ORCES • IN • FICTION 





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FORCES IN FICTION 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY RICHARD BURTON 







INDIANAPOLIS 

THE BOWEN-MERRILL COMPANY 

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Copyright 1902 
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CONTENTS 

The Fundamentals of Fiction 5 

The Cult op The Historical Romance 19 

The Love Motive in Modern Fiction 31 

The Dark in Literature 44 

Poetry and The Drama 60 

The Development of Technique in The Drama 68 

The Essay As Mood and Form 85 

The Modern Need for Literature 100 

Past and Present in Literature 119 

The Use of English 127 

A Note on Modern Criticism 143 

Literature As Craft 150 
I. The Love of The Fine Phrase 
II. What Is Literary Merit 
III. Music and Emotion in Poetry 

Indoors and Out : Two Reveries 168 



FORCES IN FICTION 

AND 

OTHER ESSAYS 

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION 

Good novel-making, technically viewed, rests 
four-square upon invention (plot), construction, 
characterization, and description. These may be 
called the fundamentals of fiction. The form of 
literature known as the story is often spoken of 
carelessly or in shallow wise as if its manner — its 
style or diction — were the chief thing, even the 
only thing. "Have you read so and so?" queries 
one lady of another in the car. "The idea isn't 
anything, but then, you know, Brown writes so 
well! His style is so good!" Again, with the 
great class of uncritical readers, represented in the 
lower grade by the blue-clothed messenger boy in 
the car immersed in the latest number of the 
"Fireside Companion," plot outweighs every other 
consideration. Possibly it does with the majority 
of all novel-lovers. 

But if, looking to the permanent successes and 
great names of fiction, we ask ourselves what 
qualities constitute the essentials of fiction, we 

5 



6 FORCES IN FICTION 

shall be likely to settle on these fundamental 
four. Furthermore, if forced to pick out the 
quality ministering most to the successful result, 
we must, I fancy, reply: character-creation. This 
judgment may fall strange onthe^ear nowadays, 
because other traits are emphasized — construction 
or style, for example. Indeed, if we examine the 
clever work of present-day novelists, we shall find 
that what often gives them reputation is ability in 
ways aside from this central, this solar, gift of 
characterization. Compared with it, invention 
and construction are secondary; description and 
style, important as they may be in the abstract, 
are as naught. A novel without salient character- 
drawing, whatever its merits in other directions, 
can never take high rank; it is almost certainly 
a failure foredoomed. 

The truth of the proposition becomes apparent 
when we come to apply it and illustrate by it. 
The firm, steady hold upon the public of certain 
fictionists, who are more or less roughly handled 
by critics, is easily explained, if we agree to this 
central place of importance held by character- 
limning. Master improvisers like Dumas and 
Scott showed their genius just here. Their per- 
sonages live; the robust types they created are 
realized to the imaginations of readers; so that 
to kill off the sense of their existence would liter- 
ally leave the actual world lonelier for many of 
us. The folk next door are real ; we know it in a 
perfunctory way. But they are phantoms com- 



THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION 7 

pared with the verity of the Three Guardsmen, or 
of Di Vernon and Dandie Dinmont. 

Dickens, to take a later novelist, is perhaps the 
best possible example of this paramount power 
which excuses shortcomings in other directions. 
Is there any other maker of story in modern Eng- 
lish literature — after all allowances have been 
made, and not forgetting that some current criti- 
cism of the man of Gadshill will have it that he is 
for a more careless age — who has begun to fur- 
nish such a portrait-gallery of worthies and 
adorable grotesques — a motley crowd whom we 
all know and enjoy and love? I wot not. The 
fact that Dickens is at times a trifle inchoate or 
careless in his English, or allows his exuberance 
to lead him into exaggeration, or fails to blend 
perfectly the discordant elements of comedy and 
tragedy, sinks into insignificance when set over 
against such a faculty as this. He was a veritable 
giant here. 

Scott, too, was by no means firm-handed in the 
matter of construction; his huddled endings so- 
called — that is, his inability to close a book in 
due proportion to its main action and in a way 
to make the issue seem inevitable — must be con- 
ceded to critical scrutiny. The reason of it lies 
in this same power he had in character-concep- 
tion. When he had fully sketched in his types, 
had presented them full-view to the audience, his 
interest in their case waned a little. Hence he 
was not so adept in getting rid of them neatly, as 



8 FORGES IN FICTION 

the novelist with an eye to a good finish must be, 
unless he supinely adopt the invertebrate method of 
a Henry James and dismiss the notion of any plot 
or argument at all for the story, which may be 
high art, but is chilling in effect upon the patrons. 
The very methods of work of the Abbotsford Sage 
were inimical to the highest results of construc- 
tion. He did not make a scenario, blocking out 
his work and seeing it in the round as he began 
to write. Rather, his imagination fired by a scene 
or a character, he reeled off page after page of 
manuscript, throwing them upon the floor, with 
no thought of revision. 

Dickens, for his part, was all his days under 
the bondage of serial publication. He wrote with 
twenty-parts in mind; and his tales would have 
been different in length, management, and even 
in the number of actors, had he been independent 
of this practical restriction. One has only to read 
"Forster's Life" to be impressed by this fact. It 
was not until comparatively late in his career that 
he gave much care to the matter of construction. 
To see how an artistic conscience developed in him 
with experience, compare early works such as 
"Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Mckleby" with 
a late success, "Great Expectations." 

Fecundity of invention may or may not consist 
with this most precious gift of character-creation. 
Scott no doubt may be said to have had a decided 
instinct for fable, even for plot. Dickens pos- 
sessed it in a less degree. Books containing his 



THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION 9 

masterpieces of humorous portraiture — "Chuzzle- 
wit," "Dombey," "Bleak House," and "Copper- 
field" are in illustration — are either slight or loose- 
jointed or unconvincing as to plot. The 
story in which above all others he tried avowedly 
to substitute serious incident for wealth of char- 
acterization, "The Tale of Two Cities," has never 
ranked among his major performances. "Great 
Expectations" is almost his only book of which it 
may be declared that a well-conceived fable is suc- 
cessfully handled. Yet Dickens certainly had a 
feeling for plot. It would be more accurate, 
therefore, to say that he never quite gained as- 
sured mastery in the proper manipulation of the 
story-strands. "Little Dorrit," for example, is a 
comparative failure, not so much because its seri- 
ous idea — the fortunes of the Dorrits in relation 
to the mystery of Mrs. Clennam — fails in inter- 
est, as because the ample satiric characterization, 
centering around the Circumlocution Office, over- 
loads and confuses the story. This great writer 
was too rich in comic inspiration not to be led into 
digressions and all sorts of fascinating departures, 
complicating the movement of the narrative, but, 
at the same time, and to the everlasting advantage 
of the world of readers, widening the field of ob- 
servation and enriching fiction with relishable 
pictures of humanity. 

With Thackeray, plot is always secondary and, 
for the most part, noticeably slight. So true is 
this that, assuming incident to be a requisite of 



10 FORCES IN FICTION 

the novel, "Vanity Fair" and "Pendennis" are 
hardly to be called novels at all; being, rather, 
satiric social sketches. In "Esmond," which as 
an historical romance demands plot more than his 
other studies of life, the same lack is easily 
recognized. It is characterization first, last, and 
all the time, with Thackeray. Thousands know 
Becky Sharp intimately who would be hard put 
to it to outline the plot in which she is a pro- 
tagonist. The naturalness, distinctness, and va- 
riety of his character-types are the qualities 
which claim our regard and admiration; and 
vastly dissimilar as Dickens is from his great fel- 
low of the earlier Victorian fiction, much the 
same description applies to him. 

In point of style, it is the fashion to laud 
Thackeray at the expense of the other ; and that, 
artist against artist, the preference is right enough 
cannot be denied. Dickens was always an unequal 
writer of English; and there is no book of his 
which as a whole does not reveal carelessnesses, of 
which Thackeray was seldom, if ever, guilty. 
But, I would venture to say, the contrast has been 
exaggerated. He of Gadshill commanded a dic- 
tion of extraordinary vigor and idiomatic fresh- 
ness and vivacity. Why should we not see it and 
say it? With a natural gift for expression, his 
reading in his youth was wonderfully well adapted 
to future results. He saturated himself with 
Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, with Addison 
and Steele. It gave him a grip on the vernacular, 



THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION 11 

which grew stronger with the years. He wrote 
all through his career under the goad, and had 
the demerits of the hasty producer; but to speak 
as if Dickens had no grace or force of diction — 
and the position has been fashionable of late — is 
simply nonsense. He often surpasses the writer 
who is more correct, just in proportion as the 
idiomatic is more precious than the merely 
proper. 

The only other major novelist of the Victorian 
mid-century, George Eliot, furnishes further food 
for reflection. The clear-eyed and sure-handed 
way in which she presents the middle-class country 
types, this it is which gives her so unassailable a 
place. When one thinks of her stories, one thinks 
perforce, and first of all, of her personages, men 
and women — Silas, Adam, Hetty, Mrs. Poyser, 
Maggie and her brother, Dorothea and Causabon, 
Tito, Deronda. Such other valuable adjuncts as 
situation, description, style, come in for subse- 
quent appreciatien ; but it is this great woman's 
characters who arise as witnesses to her art and 
her genius. George Eliot's earlier training in the 
ways of scholarship and her inherent proneness to 
psychologic philosophizing could not, in the morn- 
ing blush of literary creation, quench her native 
gift for characterization. Nor, however much the 
former encroached upon the latter, was the gift 
ever disastrously obscured until the evening day 
of "Theophrastus Such." The tendency was 
dangerous, even for a nature of her calibre : with 



12 FORCES IN FICTION 

a lesser writer it is sure to make trouble. We are 
observing to-day how Mrs. Humphrey Ward gains 
in the power of characterization and, in fact, in all 
ways as an artist, by so much as she eschews 
definite, dogmatic purpose. The parallel is es- 
pecially interesting, because in some prime req- 
uisites — in seriousness, in breadth of view, in 
largeness and nobility of spirit — Mrs. Ward, 
more than any other current fictionist, represents 
the elder woman. In the author of "Marcella" 
the loss of variety and strength of character- 
making, although in part a personal matter, is 
due in some measure to the change that has come 
over our literary ideals. 

This fact, that the novelist stands or falls by 
characterization, has its interesting application 
when we come to look at later novel-making. It 
explains the relatively limited appeal of leaders 
cried up by critics whose admiration for construc- 
tion, description, and style make them forget the 
preeminent thing. Of course, we must grant that 
the perfect novel — like the perfect man, a purely 
hypothetical creature — will have all the qualities 
in due proportion: fresh invention, masterful de- 
velopment, characters that live and move and 
have their being, description full of picturesque- 
ness and power, all conveyed in a diction that of 
itself means literature. But, humanly speaking, 
this is the unattainable ideal or, at least, the un- 
attained. Conceding this much, it may be stated 
boldly that where the present-day fictionist fails 



THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION 13 

above all else is in character — the sign, par excel- 
lence, of the creator. A few years ago it would 
have been in consonance with the facts to say that 
he was weak in invention as well. But now, with 
romances appearing daily, and startling plots in 
the very air one breathes, this lack is less felt. 
But character-making, yes. Nor can the blame 
justly be laid on the public, which is always eager 
to welcome a piece of veritable character-lim- 
ning. 

As I write, "David Harum" is the best selling 
story — and therefore book, since fiction still has 
a corner on literature. Why is this? Because it 
contains one thoroughly racy and enjoyable char- 
acter ; the rest is naught. The book is not a novel. 
It has no plot worth mentioning, and but little 
construction; being a purely conventional treat- 
ment of the love-motif. The nominal hero's only 
mortal use is, that Uncle David may have some 
one to talk to steadily. But the tale has a bona 
fide creation in David himself ; and this is enough 
to give it a remarkable and deserved popularity. 
Yet reflect a moment that there is not even a 
second-rate novel by Dickens which does not con- 
tain, I will not say one, but half a dozen, humor- 
ous character-types, any one of which might be 
named as an offset to the shrewd, kindly horse- 
trader and country banker. This is not said in 
the spirit of detraction, but merely to bring home 
the thought that we have fallen on a paucity of 
real character-creation, which results in an almost 



14 FORCES IN FICTION 

pathetically cordial reception for it when a 
modicum of it is proffered. 

Nor is it Jingoism, by the way, to remark that 
the introduction of some of the Southern and 
Western types so saliently depicted by younger 
American novelists — Page and Harris, Stuart, 
Thanet, Wister, Garland, Chopin, Fernald, and 
others — is as hopeful a sign as current fiction can 
show, and one hardly to be paralleled in England. 
In the earlier days Bret Harte took a unique 
place because of this same power, albeit not always 
used aright. Who, let us inquire, are the living 
personages in the stories of Henry James? 
Verily, since the days of "The American," the 
best in this kind are but shadows. Stevenson, ad- 
mirable in the other cardinal points of invention, 
construction, and a style that sets him apart from 
his contemporaries, has also thrown out upon the 
fictional canvas a few figures which are distinct 
— Alan Breck, David Balfour, both the Bal- 
lantraes, Kirstie the elder, and quite a portrait- 
gallery of rascals the most firm-bodied and pictur- 
esque in the novel-writing of our time. 

Can as much be said for Kipling ? Very strong 
he is, of a truth, in invention, construction, de- 
scription, and dialogue; but where are his char- 
acters? Outside of Mowgli and the Soldiers 
Three, has he given us any? An obvious answer 
is, that being primarily a short-story maker, he 
is, by the definition of his art, excluded from 
triumphs in this kind, since characterization re- 



THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION 15 

quires a larger canvas. There is something in 
this; but it does not affect the main proposition 
that Kipling's forte, thus far, has not been the 
delineation of personality. That he has been able, 
within short-story limits, to stamp Mulvaney and 
his commensals with so much individuality speaks 
volumes for his natural abilities in a perilous en- 
deavor. Nevertheless, having in view the num- 
ber of his volumes and the striking effects he has 
produced, it is worth noting that Kipling's con- 
tribution to fictional portraiture has not been 
large. 

It is curious, and a bit amusing, to see how cur- 
rent novels are heralded with trumpets of 
prophecy and followed by columnar eulogies, 
when, in this article of character truly alive, they 
are nil. An example of this class — not a small 
one — just now is Theodore Watts Dunton's 
"Aylwin." Undoubtedly, the story has romantic 
poetry in it of a strained, fantastic, and morbid 
kind. But, in respect of characterization, surely 
it is a failure. Revert in memory to such a hum- 
drum realist as Anthony Trollope, in order vividly 
to realize why that fiction-maker, whose class is 
confessedly not the first, is likely to keep his 
place in the suffrages of a large, and not undis- 
tinguished, constituency. The folk of the "Bar- 
chester Chronicles" may be commonplace and un- 
exciting; but they are verifiable and cling to the 
mind. 

This clear bodying forth of men and women in 



16 FORCES IN FICTION 

the novel sets up so good a claim to attention 
that it will often cover a multitude of sins. And 
it really seems as if, with the rapidly increasing 
skill in the other technical points of novelistic 
art, this potent, this supreme power of characteri- 
zation were in danger of its life. Is it that our 
story-tellers lack gift, genius, or simply that, in 
the care spent upon analysis or construction, de- 
scription or style, or all of them, they have lost 
sight of the most vital element in any and all 
fiction ? Or is it again — very plausible this — that 
problem and principle have led our fictionists 
somewhat away from the straight-away actions of 
flesh-and-blood folk? The pessimist will incline 
toward the easy solution, concluding that it is all 
a question of ability ; that we have fallen on little 
days, if not evil ; that when the gods go, the half- 
gods arrive. Genius was of yore: now is the 
time of carefully cultivated talents. But the stu- 
dent of social history, and literature in its rela- 
tion thereto, will prefer to see in the wonderful 
development of the art of fiction during the last 
quarter-century a more essential cause for the 
temporary abeyance in the power of creating 
salient, unforgettable characters. I say "tempo- 
rary," as expressing the belief that, just as we have 
witnessed a distinct reaction from the plotless tale 
of psychologic analysis toward stories of incident 
and action, so we are likely to see a return to the 
old emphasis on character. 

The folk of fiction in the future will not be so 



THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FICTION 17 

much pegs to hang theories upon, as human beings 
to associate with, to laugh and cry with, and to 
part from right unwillingly. And they will be 
more wholesome company withal than they have 
been, as a rule, of late. Novelists must so realize 
their characters that the bidding them good-bye 
means pain and loss to the writers themselves — as 
Dickens walked the streets of Paris the best part 
of one night in utter misery because little Paul 
Dombey had fallen on final sleep; or as Daudet 
was overcome when he had similar experience with 
his lad of the imagination, the Piteous Jack. 
The inexorable corollary to such feeling on the 
side of the creator is an affectionate faith in those 
characters on the side of the world of novel- 
readers. Let this not be forgotten in a day of the 
deification of technic and of an overweening de- 
sire to handicap the personages of fiction by mak- 
ing them more or less colorless exponents of a 
principle, a class, or a theory. 

By the knowing novelist of to-day the exposure 
of himself as caring vitally whether his manikins 
live or die is something to be avoided — even 
sneered at in others. Such an attitude is declared 
to be naive, inartistic. This is an ominous sign. 
Charles Reade, weeping over the parting with 
"Peg Womngton" — "my darling," he called her — 
is a far more convincing spectacle to a host of 
honest-hearted readers, than is that of Thackeray 
at the end of the "Newcomes" ringing down the 
curtain and putting his puppets in the box — in 



18 FORCES IN FICTION 

other words, smashing all the illusion of the tale 
by announcing in the first person its Active na- 
ture. The cold, aloof position of the late-century 
fiction-maker toward the people of his brain and 
heart may be high art, but it is precious poor 
humanity. And it is this perhaps more than any 
other one thing that is likely to keep out of our 
fiction the red blood of life. "But," cries the 
novelist, "look at my skill, my ingenuity, my 
technical excellences in half a dozen particulars 
of a difficult art."' To which the public replies: 
"True, it is magnificent, but it is not war." 



THE CULT OF THE HISTORICAL 
ROMANCE. 

There is much to justify the remark that litera- 
ture, like life, has its ephemeral fashions. A long 
yesterday ago, the epic was the favorite form of 
narration; later, the drama ruled; to-day, the 
novel is supreme. And within the limits marked 
out for that wide term, fiction, the variations in 
the kind of story are so many and apparently so 
arbitrary that they may seem, on a superficial 
glance, to depend upon incalculable social whims 
and vagaries. Indeed, we may go further and 
concede to this view, that, from decade to decade, 
certain elements of fashion do influence literary 
matters with the result that, in the case of an au- 
thor (and the same is true of a literary form), he 
attracts a following, only to be set aside ere long 
for some newer interest. Nevertheless, the idea 
that fashion controls literature, as it does woman's 
dress, for example, is one based upon specious ap- 
pearances; it ignores underlying causes which, in 
reality, define literary evolution. 

Psychologic laws and sociologic conditions ex- 
plain shifts of taste which, superficially con- 
sidered, seem as unpredicable as the desire of a 
coquette. Thus, taking the literary forms just 
mentioned, a certain stage of civilization demands 
19 



20 FORCES IN FICTIOX 

that its stories be poured into the majestic mold 
of the epic; an age more sophisticate, with a 
keener sense of national life and a greater soli- 
darity, possessing what may be called a practical 
bias for action, favors the play: while our own 
time, with its tremendously complex social needs 
and interrelations, finds in prose fiction, so flexible 
in form, so all-embracing in theme, its natural 
outlet of expression. This single fact, that our 
day has elected the novel as its representative 
form, may be regarded in two ways; it may be 
taken simply as a sign of the shallowness and 
lightheadedness of these latter years, an indica- 
tion of degeneracy, or it may be studied as 
revelatory of the aims and ideals of the time, and 
hence full of interesting suggestions. The former 
is the conclusion of the unthinking hasty; the 
latter, that of the scholar. 

But, now, what is true of the different forms, 
is true of fiction in its several sorts. Plainly 
marked changes have taken place during the past 
century (to go no further back) with a compara- 
tive regularity which a glance at literary history 
will make apparent. 

Scott, by right of power, introduced the modern 
historical romance. He stamped this kind with 
the seal of his genius, although romanticism in 
the novel was living no feeble life before him. In 
fact, the story of romantic quality was creeping 
and spreading like a prairie fire all along the 
second half of the eighteenth century, but we do 



THE CULT OF HISTORICAL ROMANCE 21 

not feel its heat until the genial influence of the 
Waverley Master. This romantic impulse and 
direction had by the year 1850 become a thing 
obsolete and only sporadically cultivated. G. P. 
R. James, whose array of Christian names has the 
effect of suggesting the too leisurely movement of 
his many romances, did more than his share, per- 
haps, in checking the taste for this kind of story- 
writing. By the middle century Dickens and 
Thackeray had returned to the method of Eich- 
ardson and Fielding and Smollett; the novel of 
analysis, depicting contemporary manners and 
types, was again in full vogue. This counter- 
swing of the pendulum brought on the noteworthy 
development conveniently (though misleadingly) 
summarized under the familiar term "realism." 
With this extension of the fictionisfs field, came 
an increased desire for accuracy and what is called 
truth; and too often this truth was of the ex- 
clusively factual sort, that which deals with visible 
phenomena or with scientific laws; or worse, it 
came to mean an insistence upon the grosser de- 
tails of the life sensual. This instinct for particu- 
larity and verity had, however, its legitimate man- 
ifestations, and did great service in rubbing 
bright the mirror of the novel, so that it might 
reflect without distortion the image of the time. 
The importance as well as dominance of the so- 
called realistic movement during the past five-and- 
twenty years can hardly be overrated. The critic 
cannot quarrel with the statement that it repre- 



22 FORCES IN FICTION 

sents fiction's most characteristic evolution in the 
century's last quarter. What other tendency has 
been so widespread and influential — the influence 
amounting to a revolution of method, aim, and 
interpretation ? 

Yet the very insistence upon analysis and detail 
self-doomed it to suffer a reaction. The romantic 
revival of the past decade draws attention to the 
inevitable swing-back of the pendulum, a move- 
ment away from the realistic and towards the ro- 
mantic, and freshly emphasizes for the scholar 
the laws by which fiction in its historic growth 
shifts from one to the other of these two main 
purposes. Keeping to the figure of the pendulum, 
we might say that the arc described has for its 
two limits, realism, the desire for truth, and ro- 
manticism, the desire for poetry. Quite as truly 
as in the physical world, a swing one way implies 
a swing the other, and corresponding to the 
central pull of gravity is that same instinct of 
normal human nature, drawing the novel back to 
a middle point of art. Thus, in a sense, scientific 
laws of ebb and flow control the changes in this 
typical modern literary form. And hence the 
present marked popularity of romantic narrative 
is a phase which one with his eye on the evolution 
of fiction since Scott could have predicated with 
little trouble. 

Our opinion of the momentary cult of the ro- 
mance will be modified in the first place by our 
attitude towards the romantic as a method, and 



THE CULT OF HISTORICAL ROMANCE 23 

in the last by our estimate of the quality of the 
work at present being done under that banner-cry. 
As to the former, it seems fair to say that if by ro- 
mance we mean the truthful handling of the more 
exceptional and noble incidents and characters in 
life, in such wise as not to imply that they are 
more frequent in occurrence than in reality they 
are, the romantic is a welcome visitor. Certainly 
it is inspiring to meet people in fiction who ex- 
emplify the finer traits of humanity, and to be 
introduced to situations which stir the soul out 
of the walking trance of everyday existence. Nor 
is there any harm in it, along with the good, un- 
less life and the folk thereof are treated with a 
certain sickly pseudo-idealism which makes the 
world an impossible phantasmagoria, and its men 
and women to appear like the philosopher's trees 
walking. To condemn that sort of fictional nar- 
cotic is not to condemn the true romance: db 
dbusu ad usum non valet consequentia. The critic 
may well cry up the nobler order of romance 
which includes the right kind of realism, because 
it tells the truth about the most interesting and 
uplifting aspects of human life, while it does not 
fall into the error of putting too much stress upon 
the lower stages of the slow painful process by 
which man mounts to higher things. 

But now as to the product itself, which in these 
latter days is put out so generously, stamped with 
the promiseful trade-mark, Romanticism. That 
there is much good in it, only the confirmed cynic 



24: FORCES IN FICTION 

will deny. Three roads it takes; that of the 
pastoral idyl, that of the modern adventure-tale,, 
and that of the historical romance. And the most 
notable results just now seem to come by this last- 
named way. In England the young romantics led 
by Stevenson, with such doughty lieutenants as 
Doyle, Hope, Weyman, Barrie and Quiller-Couch, 
with later writers of whom Hewlett is typical, 
come to mind. To these and others of their faith 
the "fair field of old romance" has been attractive 
and yielded golden fruit in two senses — the 
artistic and the mercantile. Stimulated by their 
example, American writers have waked up to a 
realization of the rich historic material native to 
their own land; and major attempts like Dr. 
Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne," Mr. Stimson's "King 
Noanett," Mr. Allen's "The Choir Invisible" and 
"The Eeign of Law," Mr. Churchill's "Kichard 
Carvel," Mr. Tord's "Janice Meredith," Miss 
Jewett's "A Tory Lover," and Miss Johnston's 
"To Have and to Hold," are only a few among a 
less conspicuous many. 

Most of these books are welcome both as a con- 
tribution to native history and as an extension of 
the individual outlook upon life ; they have suffi- 
cient art, truth and power to justify their appear- 
ance. The warmth of their reception, indeed, while 
it may be explained in part by saying that the pub- 
lic, starved for years, was ahungered for imagina- 
tive presentation of any sort, means quite as truly 
that such like novels have genuine merit. The sue- 



THE CULT OF HISTORICAL ROMANCE 25 

cesses of the moment are mostly in this line; not 
exclusively — witness the merry sale of "David 
Harum," — but so prevailingly that the phrase, a 
romantic cult, as applied to the present situation, 
is not inaccurately descriptive. 

And the inevitable result is at hand. Second- 
rate writers are turning to the historic romance, 
not because they are compelled from within to do 
so, but rather because they strive to meet an 
obvious demand; their impulse is mercantile, not 
artistic. The market is in danger of being flooded 
with spurious imitations of the real article. Not 
a few fiction-fashioners are serving not Scott but 
Mammon. Several current stories are far from 
being finished works of art, nor indeed do they 
show sufficient power or skill, one would suppose, 
to justify their vogue; yet how wide an audience 
have they found! Such diet cannot be peptonic 
in the long run ; its careless acceptance will speed 
the day of the return of an exaggerated realism. 
It is hardly too much to say that in the present 
year of grace the general public is fairly rabid for 
heroic stories of the past. Publishers are suggest- 
ing historic themes to novelists, who, on their side, 
are grubbing in old records and furbishing up 
their memories of bygone centuries and countries. 
Booksellers buy their wares, keenly cognizant of 
this popular appeal. The proprietor of the lead- 
ing book-shop in a large Western city was filling 
his front window one morning with Ford's "Janice 
Meredith," just then hot from the press ; and upon 



26 FORCES IN FICTION 

my expressing a mild doubt as to his getting rid 
of so many copies, replied briskly that the more 
probable trouble would be to keep the story in 
stock. This was not faith without works, to be 
sure, for Mr. Ford is a popular novelist; but the 
fact that the book in question was an historic ro- 
mance, and of American motive at that, furnished 
the extra weight to turn the scales. Had the fic- 
tion been of the more psychologic sort my book- 
seller's voice had not sounded with such a chirrup 
of confidence. And in justification of his judg- 
ment, in the first week's sale thirteen thousand 
copies of the book went off, and its subsequent 
fortune has been of like kind. 

Now one may admire the historical romance in 
its place and degree, and yet deprecate the tend- 
ency to laud romance for romance's sake. For this 
last attitude brings about the circulation of much 
that is mediocre, if not worthless; it holds back 
the true development of fictional art; it tends to 
a partizan patronage of the part rather than the 
whole; and, as already hinted, it is very likely to 
precipitate a reactionary devotion to the narrow 
realism from which there would seem to be a 
happy escape. One's very dislike of this stupid, 
vulgar abuse of fiction inclines one to cry a halt 
on the present uncritical deification of the so- 
called romantic. Xor, frankly, does the romance 
give the full picture. To lay the scenes of a novel 
in older times is no warrant that it will be either 
artistic or readable. 



THE CULT OF HISTORICAL ROMANCE 27 

From the very nature of the historical romance 
the danger of missing the right method is 
peculiarly strong. An effective romance must 
possess, over and above its verisimilitude, the re- 
production of bygone speech, manners, and char- 
acter types, those elemental human qualities 
which shall make it interesting, expressive. This 
quality it is which gives Scott earlier and Sien- 
kiewicz later a claim upon the world of readers, 
critical and general. To secure this result has, I 
say, difficulties exceptional and only to be over- 
come by a life-work. To appeal through 
piquancy of costuming or the unhackneyed nature 
of the situations is legitimate enough; but this is 
subordinate to that essential humanity in a ro- 
mance which forces the thoughtful to call it finely 
representative. 

While I cannot go so far as Professor Brander 
Matthews, who believes that it is this alone which 
makes the historical story survive its own day, 
the local color and the illusion of the past being 
largely unknown, since no man really knows a 
former century, I do agree with him heartily in 
the primary necessity that fiction of this sort shall 
show the abiding interests and passions. Pan 
Michel may be honestly Slavonic as to type, but 
it is the more important fact that he is a child- 
hearted lover and hero-patriot which brings all 
nations to his death-scene. Mr. Frederick Har- 
rison, himself a historian, concedes to the writer 
of historical romance the opportunity of what he 



28 FORCES IN FICTION 

calls '^historic realism/"' a phrase he uses in re- 
gard to "Kichard Yea and Nay." It would seem 
true that, in a sense, the very perfection of the 
illusion in a picture of past times constitutes its 
claim to realism — a reality which neither reader 
nor writer can ever prove at first hand nor even 
by documentary evidence. 

A further thought forces itself upon us here. 
Eomantic literature, to be honest, must stand for 
the romantic spirit of the age that produces it; 
otherwise it is felt to be pastiche, an imitation, 
not a reality. Is our age, in truth, one that finds 
its deepest, most sympathetic expression in the 
historical novel? On the contrary, is it not the 
strong, fine, truthful representation of present- 
day vital issues which most appeals to the largest 
number of educated readers? The question may 
at least be asked. If so it is, then the current 
craze for the romance has no firm rootage, and 
another reason for its probable brief cultivation is 
found. Prof. W. P. Trent, in a recent suggestive 
paper, goes so far as to say that "there is no 
genuine spirit of romanticism abroad to-day;" 
which is a more sweeping assertion than those of 
us who believe that the interest in romance is in a 
sense eternal would care to make. Nevertheless, 
it may be argued with much show of reason that 
the modern attitude of mind after a half century 
of science, expressed in the august word Evolution, 
and after so thorough an indoctrination in the 
idea that the novel's chief business is to depict life 



THE CULT OF HISTORICAL ROMANCE 29 

as it is, for our instruction, cannot quite go back 
to the old dissipation in the not seldom noxious 
sweets of romantic illusion or delusion. 

Certain evils, then, are possible to the enthu- 
siasm for historic romance, and it is perhaps as 
well to draw attention to them just at the point 
when, in the "first fine careless rapture" of ap- 
preciation, the critical faculty may be lulled to 
sleep. Let us have the romance of the larger, 
nobler kind, by all means; but let us sternly re- 
fuse to read history fiction that is neither sound 
history nor good fiction. In our relish for the 
(perfectly admissible) presentation of heroics 
(within limits which should be definitely under- 
stood), let us not overlook the admirable work 
steadily being done in the United States, as else- 
where, in the vast and varied fields of sane real- 
ism. If we would not witness a woful return to 
realism of the baser sort, we must take care not to 
get a surfeit even of a good thing. The teaching 
of literary history here is so plain that he who 
runs may read. 

The present taste for romance, natural and 
wholesome as it is, does not necessarily mean a 
permanent triumph of that particular tendency; 
in fact, to believe it did, were to make light of the 
lesson taught by the historic life of fiction since 
the year 1814, when the Waverley Novels began to 
bewitch the imaginations of men. Just because of 
the vigor of its romantic impulse will the pendu- 
lum swing back toward realism; and it lies 



30 FORCES IN FICTION 

primarily with the intelligent reading public 
whether the counter movement is not excessive, 
producing once again in current novels the petty 
particularity, the dreary lack of incident, the at- 
tention to malodorous material, and the waspish 
interpretation of life, which, in various combina- 
tions, are associated in many minds with the hard- 
ridden word, realism. 



THE LOVE MOTIVE IN MODERN 
FICTION 

It may be said that of old a story in fiction of 
the English tongue meant a love story. This is a 
generalization that the memories of novel readers 
of an elder generation will justify. As love is the 
central fact and solar force in the life of man as 
he emerges from the brute; so, naturally, it was 
given the role of protagonist in the human passion 
play. "Love," says Mr. Howells in a recent piece 
of fiction, "has to be in every picture of life, as it 
has to be in every life." 

Peter Bayne, in 1860, defined the novel as a 
"domestic history" in which the incidents and 
evolution centered in the amatory passion. Even 
present day dictionaries emphasize the love theme, 
in describing fiction. In the fiction of the eight- 
eenth century the love depicted was, take it by 
and large, stilted, narrow and unideal. But it 
played a very important role, nevertheless, 
whether it was handled in its coarser manifesta- 
tions by a Fielding or treated with the compara- 
tively prim propriety of a Jane Austen. 

The novel, then, of all present literary forms 
most reflective of modern society, has mirrored the 
thoughts, feelings and acts connected with love to 
the exclusion, or, at least, to the comparative 

31 



32 FORCES IN FICTION 

neglect, of other social motor forces. But in the 
remarkable development of fiction which has 
taken place during the past quarter-century — a 
movement beginning to crystallize into definite 
results with Zola at the time of the Franco-Prus- 
sian war, a change is to be chronicled in the 
handling and valuation of the love-motive and 
its successive stages. The result has suggestion 
and interest not only for its bearings on modern 
fiction but also on the life such literature portrays. 
In the treatment of love in the old-fashioned 
"goody-goody" story of English manufacture 
earlier in our century, that passion was regarded 
as fitly interpreted by two young folk of opposite 
sex in the pre-nuptial period; under proper social 
restrictions they met, were attracted, wooing and 
winning followed in due course and the novelist's 
duty was done when he had effected a happy cul- 
mination at the altar — a word to which the later, 
more cynical exponent of fiction prefixes the let- 
ter h. "And so they were married and lived hap- 
pily forever after," is the fairy-tale phrase drop- 
ping the curtain upon this tame denouement. I 
am aware that this is a sweeping statement, that 
older English fiction sometimes treats the love 
motive more robustly. The amatory relations of 
Mr. B. and Pamela, the gallantries of Tom Jones 
appear vigorous and sufficiently unconventional 
when set over against these milk-and-water epi- 
sodes. But the run of stories prior to the incom- 
ing of realism was of the sort indicated; the ex- 



LOVE MOTIVE IN MODERN FICTION 33 

perience of veteran novel readers will sustain me. 
The foreign novelists and critics made fun of the 
English for this tendency. 

Gradually, however, and no doubt under foreign 
influence, came a bolder handling, a wider ex- 
tension of the theme. Love began to be recognized 
as an explosive capable of tearing people to pieces ; 
a power productive of unhappiness along with 
felicity. Shakespeare's "The course of true love 
never did run smooth," became a motto for tales 
in which many obstacles to the eventual pleasant 
round-up in church were imagined, and men and 
maidens not only loved, but misunderstood, quar- 
reled, and lost or went astray. These narratives 
were more or less sad, but not necessarily pessi- 
mistic; they marked a step away from the stereo- 
typed "good ending" of the primitive love-tale. 
But sentimental they were to the lachrymosal pitch 
of a Mackenzie. And they testify to a broaden- 
ing conception of life in one of its most vital as- 
pects; life as compounded of bitter and sweet in 
uncertain shifting proportions, and not as con- 
tinuously saccharine. This sad ending became in 
time as conventional as the earlier happy ending. 
The ladies who wept over Richardson's "Clarissa 
Harlowe" and knelt imploring the novelist to spare 
their beloved heroine's life, were evidently less 
inured to fictional pain than their novel-reading 
descendants. 

Then came another extension of subject. It 
occurred to those who narrate imagined deeds that 



34 FORCES IN FICTION 

to stop at marriage was unfair and absurd; an 
arbitrary bait at a mid-station of tbe life journey, 
wben stirring haps and mishaps lay beyond. So, 
with the French as leaders, enters the whole brood 
of fiction dealing with marital relations and an- 
swerable for so much that is malodorous, but also 
for a great deal that is strong and fine. Here such 
names as Hardy, Meredith and Moore, Tolstoy, 
Flaubert, Zola and Daudet, Sudermann and 
Bjornson, D'Annunzio, Yalera and Bazan, come 
to mind as representative, standing for many 
others. Main attention came to be given to post- 
marital experiences. The novelists were fain to 
illustrate the homely saying, "When a man mar- 
ries his trouble begins," and the miseries of the 
mismated were set forth in epic sweep. And by 
an inevitable farther step, the relations of im- 
propriety — the French "drame a trois" — have been 
delineated with -a gusto and particularity which 
have left little to be hoped for, — or dreaded. 

It is as natural for George Meredith or Thomas 
Hardy or George Moore to show the tragedies of 
unconventional sex relations as it was for Dickens 
to sum up those of the oppressed poor or Thack- 
eray to describe family embroglios. Thus, in a 
progressive treatment of love happy, love un- 
happy, love sensual and love of the union litre 
type, the later novelists, outside of our language 
most noticeably, but within it to an appreciable 
degree, have moved away from the quaint and 
comfortable depictment of the pretty boy-and-girl 



LOVE MOTIVE IN MODERN FICTION 35 

sentiment, to do justice to an imperious, untram- 
meled passion in the full exercise of its tragic 
power. They have now run the gamut, it would 
seem ; love as a social force has been sounded in its 
complete diapason. Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," 
beginning the narrative where the old-fashioned 
tale would have closed, and conducting an un- 
happy marriage situation through an experience 
of guilty love to a tragic conclusion, is typical 
of the class. 

Hence has followed a shift in the use of this 
motive in fiction, which I would emphasize. It 
would appear that novelists, by an unconscious re- 
action, perhaps, or it may be with the feeling that 
even a theme so central and dominant as this, can 
be overworked, have, for the time at least, rele- 
gated love to a place nearer the circumference of 
the circle and for the nonce are finding their stim- 
ulus elsewhere. A plain sign of this is the re- 
crudescence of the story of adventure. Fighting 
instead of loving, furnishes the attraction, and plot 
takes the place of esoteric emotion. During the 
past dozen years the tale of objective incident and 
action in English fiction has all but pre-empted 
the field; a significant change of theme, indeed. 
To be sure, love is often admitted into these nar- 
ratives, but the point is that as a motive it is sub- 
sidiary to the major appeal. A striking example 
is given us in the work of the two writers of En- 
glish fiction confessedly leaders in contemporary 
literature. I refer to Stevenson and Kipling. 



36 FORCES IN FICTION 

Neither of them has awarded to love the old-time, 
traditional post of honor. 

It has heen said commonly of Stevenson that 
he could not manage love as a theme. He himself 
in the ever delightful Letters confesses with dan- 
gerous frankness his lack of confidence in han- 
dling this motive. He felt that his power lay else- 
where. Nevertheless, he was in his latest work com- 
ing to admit this more lyric interest, along with 
the heroic; "Kidnapped" and its sequel, "David 
Balfour," are an instructive contrast in this regard. 
While the former is a straightaway adventure tale, 
with scant attention to petticoats, the other, writ- 
ten some years later, contains a charming heroine 
and some of the prettiest lovemaking in modern 
fiction. Nor will the true Stevenson lover ever 
forget "Prince Otto," an earlier work that deals 
with the love motive in a charming vein of delicate, 
quaint poetry. In Stevenson's final books, too, "St. 
Ives" and "Weir of Hermiston," this interest is 
more prominent. "St. Ives," indeed, is a story in 
which adventure and sweethearting run hand in 
hand ; and that fascinating torso Cf Weir," so far as 
it goes, might fairly be called a love-tale, though 
Mr. Colvin's postscript shows us that the objective 
incident of peril and derring-do was to have culmi- 
nating force. Stevenson, in a word, might be char- 
acterized as a writer who as he matured was led 
more and more to a consideration of the eternal 
feminine. Yet his genius did not find its most 
authentic inspiration there; and looking to the 



LOVE MOTIVE IN MODERN FICTION 37 

full range of his imaginative creation, it may be 
declared that he used the love motive but charily ; 
his main business was with the other passions of 
men. 

With Kipling the thesis receives still more ob- 
vious illustration. In the comparatively slight, 
tentative sketches known as the Gadsby series, he 
attempted the treatment of amatory affairs after 
the manner of the cynic. But that sort of thing 
ill suited his vigorous grasp of life and healthy 
sanity, and was soon sloughed off. The bulk of the 
Indian Tales — and the best of them — , the later 
volumes of short stories whose themes are not of 
the East; the wonderful "Jungle Books;"- the col- 
laborated "Naulahka;" and the capital sea-yarn 
"Captains Courageous," all of these find their in- 
tensity of interest outside love. The later collec- 
tions of short tales, "Many Inventions" and "The 
Day's Work," do not violate my statement. "The 
Brushwood Boy" in the second named volume, a 
story in which the love passion is certainly cen- 
tral, stands out in contrast with the rest of the 
narratives. An exception may be made of "The 
Light That Failed," where obviously the relations 
of Dick and Maisie claim our chief attention, al- 
though if we examine the book for its purpose, it 
will appear that the study of the artist tempera- 
ment is the author's main aim. Still, this fiction 
may fairly enough be called a love story. But 
for a writer of a dozen volumes, Kipling has in- 
dicated distinctly his preference for other motives. 



38 FORCES IN FICTION 

No one in thinking of either him or Stevenson 
would dream of citing them as exponents of the 
so-called master-passion. 

The same tendency is to be seen in the work of 
the one contemporary woman writer whose fiction 
has the scope, poise, dignity and art likely to give 
her more than ephemeral distinction. Mrs. 
Humphrey Ward has not ignored the love motive, 
but rather has made it subordinate to other inter- 
ests, — religion, politics, sociology. Her early book, 
"Miss Bretherton," might be described as a love 
tale, pure and simple. But with and since "Robert 
Elsmere"her vision has been wider. The affectional 
relations of the sexes are dealt with in that novel 
also, of course; as likewise, in some phases of its 
multiform power, in "David Grieve," in "Mar- 
cella," in "Sir George Tressady," "The Story of 
Bessie Costrell," "Helbeck of Bannisdale," and es- 
pecially in "Eleanor." But, with the exception of 
"Eleanor," none of them are love stories in the con- 
ventional sense. Even in "Eleanor," which would 
properly enough, I suppose, be termed a love tale, 
the interest is in the sharply contrasted women 
characters far more than in the outcome of Ban- 
nisty's somewhat febrile passion. "What the reader 
is likely to recall first in these books of Mrs. Ward 
is the modern clerg3Ttian confronted with doubt; 
the aspiring young woman learning by dint of hard 
experience the true difficulties between the classes 
and masses; the humble born man fighting his 
way to the spiritual peace that comes out of emo- 



LOVE MOTIVE IN MODERN FICTION 39 

tional storm and stress; the great lady influential 
in affairs, a power behind the throne ; the peasant 
girl crushed by her pitiless environment ; the well- 
born mine owner anxious to adjust the questions of 
labor versus capital and solving the problem with 
his knife; the agnostic girl and Eomanist aris- 
tocrat trying to make love overleap the barriers of 
environment and temperament. All through these 
well wrought and noble volumes woman walks as 
meet mate to man, shoulder to shoulder with him 
in the struggle. Indeed, Mrs. Ward and Mere- 
dith are conspicuous among present day novelists 
of repute and power in delineating the New Wom- 
an in the high sense of the contemned word; 
which is to say, the Eternal Woman under the 
broader, more exacting conditions of our complex 
social life. George Meredith's Diana is a creation 
only possible to this new conception of woman. 
Indeed, it is instructive to compare Meredith's 
Lucy in "The Ordeal of Richard Feveril," a book 
published over forty years ago, with so late a 
woman characterization as his Diana; it suggests 
that the novelist himself changes with the time. 
In the same way, food for reflection can be found 
in a comparison of George Eliot and Mrs. Ward in 
their respective treatments of women. A veritable 
evolution of view can be traced. 

The rejuvenescence of romance which has been so 
noticeable in England and America within the past 
half dozen years, and the revival of the historical 
novel both there and in the United States, also 



40 FORCES IN FICTION 

stand for a mood which, while it does not neces- 
sarily exclude the treatment of love, at least looks 
more naturally to objective incident and bellicose 
action for its subject-material. It may then fairly 
be postulated from present indications that the 
love theme, traditionally so central, and illuminat- 
ing the course of English fiction from Fielding to 
Meredith will be in the future — not eliminated — 
but handled in conjunction with and subordinate 
to the modern interests which have so vastly ex- 
tended the content of the novel in our time. Or 
is it saner prophecy to declare that, by a natural 
law of reaction, the novelists of the next century 
will come back to an older assumption, reinstating 
the love that is after all the light of life, in its 
old time queenship? One consideration makes 
this dubious. The shifted place of the love motive 
is due to the shifted place of woman in the social 
complex. She is no longer reared to regard mar- 
riage as a sole vocation. The daughters of well- 
to-do and cultured folk are not infrequently edu- 
cated nowadays with an eye to self-supporting 
work. Even if parental encouragement lacks, 
modern girls in increasing numbers are ambitious 
to achieve in some field of endeavor. The spinster 
of to-day no longer sits with folded hands by the 
lonesome hearth sadly reminiscent, knitting her 
employ, regret her mood. She turns artist, house- 
decorator, architect, teacher, actor, musician, 
nurse, writer, physician or lawyer. She looks to 
the future, not to the past. With this infinitely 



LOVE MOTIVE IN MODERN FICTION 41 

more complex activity and its correspondent 
breadth of outlook, it is easy to understand that 
the conventional value of love to her life — "'Tis 
woman's whole existence," quoth Byron — should 
give way; and equally easy to understand that 
story makers, perceiving the social drift, should 
register it in their feignings of human intercourse. 
The term "old maid" is fast passing, at least in 
any opprobrious sense. Balzac did a daring thing 
in making the woman of thirty interesting and 
eligible for a prominent position in his fiction. 
It is now the commonplace of novel-writing 
to show her power, her charm, her right to a use- 
ful life independent of the poor creature, man. 
Dickens's women, as a rule, seem old-fashioned to 
us as we read him to-day; his presentation of 
them in this respect is one of the chief explana- 
tions of the fact. 

It must be remembered, too, in the discussion 
that the representation of love varies with nation- 
ality. The tendency in English fiction to remove 
this motive from its supreme position is by no 
means typical of the European literatures. The 
Latin races, as a whole, for example, incline still 
to make fictional interest dependent upon love, 
and usually upon love sensual. Mrs. Crawford, 
writing in the lamented Cosmopolis of the brilliant 
young Italian, D'Annunzio, remarks that in his 
country the love motive predominates to an extent 
that sober Northern natures cannot realize. Of 
Spain, this is also true, though to a less degree. 



42 FORCES IN FICTION 

In France, however, a land always sensitively in 
the van of intellectual and social progress, the 
prevalence of the novel of passion is by no means 
what it was a few years ago. Zola's latest novels 
subordinate the love motive; witness the trilogy 
of the cities. 

It is, then, in fiction of our own tongue that the 
revolt from the tyranny of love as an all-absorb- 
ing theme can be traced most convincingly. And 
it seems to me that this is a testimonial to the 
inspiring breadth and variety of our novel. Sneers 
have been plenty in respect to the narrow prudery 
of the life-view expressed in English novels; but 
unwillingness to treat of the bestial aspects of 
love is no whit narrower than unwillingness to 
admit the other main interests and passions of 
mankind. In this admission our fiction leads, and, 
so far as it goes, such leadership is a proof, not of 
narrowness, but of breadth, — of a truer insight 
and a finer sense of proportion in looking out 
upon the great human show. 

Still, let us admit that the somewhat remark- 
able change I have glanced at is really not so 
much the disappearance of Love, as an altered 
(and broader) conception of it, together with the 
admission of other interests as the life picture 
has grown larger. Disappear love never will from 
fiction until it does from Life, — which will happen 
only when our sun has become a moon. Sex 
love in the latest and noblest conception is one 
phase, and a precious phase, of the all -love, — a 



LOVE MOTIVE IN MODERN FICTION 43 

power and a principle of many manifestations; 
friend-love, child-love, parent-love, patriotism, na- 
ture-love, love for truth, for religion, — an idea 
finely brought out in an essay by Sidney Lanier 
posthumously published. It is natural that with 
this broader apperception of the word, novelists 
should elect not only these more varied phases of 
Love, but also use war, politics, socialism, social 
ambitions, trade, sports, art, literature, religion, 
as motives to make their pages animated and 
cheerful and more truly representative of Life 
itself. 



THE DARK IN LITERATURE 

Those who are sensitive to literature at all turn 
to it for various reasons, — for rest, pleasure, com- 
fort, instruction, uplift. To forget its power to 
make this manifold appeal were sadly to restrict 
its influence. Literature follows the gospel in- 
junction; it is many things to many men. This, 
indeed, is only a roundabout way of saying that 
it is a great force in the world ; for how otherwise 
could it get a wide hearing? 

Nevertheless, I am persuaded that the larger 
number of readers still look, as they have always 
looked, to poem and essay, play and story — to 
belles lettres, in short — for what may be called 
pleasure. Of old, this was overwhelmingly true; 
it is somewhat less apparent now, when both au- 
thor and reader have come to take their literature 
seriously, and duty at times crowds delight to the 
wall. However, the wayfaring man continues to 
insist, in good set terms, on an agreeable time 
when he opens a book; and if you are fain to in- 
struct him you must do it cautiously without over- 
much announcement of your laudable purpose. 
Unless the pill be sugar-coated he will have none 
of it; homoeopathy is the school he favors. 

Critics who overlook this natural human tenden- 
cy are letting themselves get professional and out 
of touch with their fellow mortals. I believe that, 

44 



THE DARK IN LITERATURE 45 

while our conception of the use of literature may 
well be a broader one, this pathetic desire of aver- 
age humanity to be pleased is a wholesome notifi- 
cation to critic and creator, to special student and 
him of the inner circle, that the main business of 
letters is to furnish joy to the children of men. 
Especially is this thought pertinent to-day, when 
the other obligations of literature are underscored. 

It is as well to remember that unhappiness is 
not an end in itself. The assumption, by the way, 
that a book must either please or instruct, as if 
the two demands were mutually exclusive, is ab- 
surd — an example of false logic. Eather may it 
be said, as Stevenson has it, that "to please is to 
serve ; and so far from its being difficult to instruct 
while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thor- 
oughly without the other." 

But no honest person can go far in the fruitful 
study of the masterpieces of thought and expres- 
sion without coming face to face with the need 
of extending this pleasure-giving concept of litera- 
ture, or, at any rate, of using the word pleasure 
in a fuller significance. He finds that it is very 
much with literature as it is with the weather. 
All sorts are encountered, the stormy with the 
bland; and even in the presumably serene climate 
of the so-called immortals, halcyon days by no 
means run the year round. He is confronted, 
sooner or later, with the questions: How broad 
may I make my definition of this elusive term 
pleasure ? What is the proper proportion of light 



46 FORCES IN FICTION 

and shade in these pictures of life painted with 
words instead of colors ? Has the dark — meaning 
thereby the somber and sad, the terrible, brutal, 
and abnormal elements of life reflected in books — 
any justification? And where are the bounds to 
be set ? Upon the answers depend his whole atti- 
tude toward literature and the amount of substan- 
tive enrichment received from it. I know of no 
more important moment in personal literary cul- 
ture than the one of this decision; and it was 
with a sense of this importance that my theme 
was chosen. 

Few even of those who are unfriendly to the 
dark in literature, will deny that the sad has some 
right there, or that pleasure may co-exist with 
sadness. To shut out the imaginative presentation 
of the tragic would result in a woful weakening 
and crippling of literature — would, indeed, decap- 
itate masterpiece after masterpiece. From the 
time that Aristotle pointed out the noble function 
of tragedy in purging our souls through terror 
and pity, the major creators in literature have 
steadily illustrated his position. And, in truth, 
long before the great Greek critic, the Hebrew 
rhapsodists shook their time, and after-time, with 
the very thunders of Sinai. It might also be said 
that the precious places, the mighty effects, in 
world-literature, are just those where the grave 
things of life are set before us surcharged with 
passion, but touched with beauty, set to consoling 
music, and illumined by imperishable hopes. Job, 



THE DARK IN LITERATURE 47 

superbly alone and afflicted on his ash-heap; An- 
tigone, going smiling to her tomb; Chaucer's 
Griselda, patient and amazed at her ill treatment, 
and exclaiming, as the thought of her husband's 
earlier love for her overwhelmed her mind: 

"O gode God! how gentil and how kinde 
Te semed by your speche and your visage 
The day that maked was our mariage"; 

Lear appealing to the stormy heavens, since they 
were old like him; Dante listening to Francesca's 
piteous tale of love, strong though in hell; Gret- 
chen in the Garden, conscious of her guilt, yet 
crying with that infinitely pathetic child-cry: 

"Yet, everything that led me here 
Was oh, so good, was oh, so dear"; 

Beatrice Cenci, talking of her hair just before 
she goes out to the block ; Mildred, in Browning's 
"A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," with those wonderful 
girlish words of hers: 

"I— I was so young! 
Beside, I loved him, Thorold— and I had 
No mother; God forgot me: so I fell"— 

these, I say, are the scenes that to the lover of 
literature rise up in memory like southern stars 
in the night heavens, stars whose sombre setting is 
the very condition of the splendor of their shining. 
Give us this kind of sadness, by all means, for by 
it our souls grow and we are made to feel the 
sacred majesty of humankind. It is not so much 
sadness, strictly speaking, that we experience in 



48 FORCES IN FICTION 

looking at these moving life dramas, as a sort of 
sober joy. Our sense of homo sapiens is enlarged 
as to his essential dignity and worth. This is sad- 
ness, not for its own sake, but for humanity's. 

Nor should we forget that, besides this proper 
acceptance of what I may term the legitimate and 
wholesome sad in literature, many folk have a 
morbid love of sadness for its own sake. There 
is no hypochondriac like your young person in 
the storm and stress period of his career. Fears 
are his food and tears his daily portion. In 
youth we like to take our pleasures sadly; while 
in the years that bring the philosophic mind we 
try to take our pains with a smiling mouth. A 
type of spinster exists which affects funerals as 
the chief of worldly joys. This pleasure in the 
lugubrious is certainly a trait to be found at least 
sporadically in the world. Perhaps it existed in 
the past more frequently than it does now — I hope 
so. Judge Sewall has this entry in his diary: 
"Spent the morning in the vault rearranging the 
family coffins. It was a pleasant but awful treat." 
This zest for the melancholy is quite another 
thing, of course, from the response to that beauti- 
ful, close harmony, which, though it sound like a 
discord, is yet so suggestive of the perfect har- 
mony (the ideal) as to make us tremble with de- 
light. I only wish to make the point that there 
is in human nature some response to a less admir- 
able phase of the dark in life and literature, a 
kind of ghoulish joy in the grave. The mock- 



THE DARK IN LITERATURE 49 

romantic cult in fiction, in the time of Horace 
Walpole and Mrs. Kadcliffe, gives another ex- 
ample. Eecall that delicious bit of dialogue in 
Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," where she 
satirizes the tendency: 

" 'But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing 
with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with 
Udolpho?' 

" 'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and 
I am got to the black veil.' 

" 'Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not 
tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are 
you not wild to know?' 

" 'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me: 
I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be 
a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! 
I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my 
whole life in reading it, I assure you; if it had not been 
to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all 
the world.' 

" 'Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and 
when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian 
together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve 
more of the same kind for you.' 

" 'Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they 
all?' 

" 'I will read you their names directly; here they are 
In my pocketbook: "Castle of Wolfenbach," "Clermont," 
"Mysterious Warnings," "Necromancer of the Black 
Forest," "Midnight Bell," "Orphan of the Rhine," and 
"Horrid Mysteries." Those will last us some time.' 

" 'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you 
sure they are all horrid?' 

" 'Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a 
Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures 
in the world, has read every one of them.' " 

Some rather cynical theories of human nature 
go even further than this. A distinguished French 
dramatic critic of our day, in a recent work on 
the ancient and modern drama, takes the position 



50 FORCES IN FICTION 

that our interest in tragedy is at bottom simply 
the survival of the old savage instinct of cruelty, 
the enjoyment of suffering. He builds up a whole 
superstructure of theory upon this foundation. I 
believe myself that he does great wrong to human 
psychology in this ingenious assumption, which, 
however, is interesting as offering one explana- 
tion of certain familiar tendencies in modern lit- 
erature. But one hardly needs to say that all this 
morbid affecting of the sad is clearly to be dis- 
tinguished from its proper use in books. 

But not the pathetic alone, the awful, too, is 
common in literature — an element that not so 
much moves us to tenderness as it freezes us 
with fear or humbles us with a feeling of our 
own littleness in the face of the sublime. This 
influence again, when not out of proportion, 
can be easily accepted; in fact, the term pleasure 
may be possibly so enlarged in its meaning as to 
include this idea. Irving, in his "Conquest of 
Granada/' speaks of the "pleasing terror" begotten 
in him by the sight of a shaggy Adalusian bull 
encountered among the mountains of his native 
wilds. The expression puts before us, epigram- 
matically, a psychological truth. There is a stern, 
lofty grandeur in the works of creative genius 
which constitutes their head-mark of merit. Lit- 
erature would be poor, indeed, without its Michael 
Angelos and its Beethovens, its Wagners and its 
Yereschagins. Their works may not soften, but 
they strengthen our sinews for the fight. And as 



THE DARK IN LITERATURE 51 

we go on in life we gradually come to care more 
for and to get more from, these austere, great per- 
formances. A young man or woman at twenty- 
one might be inclined to refuse to the terrible a 
place in literature ; the same person at forty might 
be deriving from that source the most precious 
part of his or her experience. 

Man's attitude toward the awe-inspiring has 
rapidly changed during the last one hundred and 
fifty years. English literature registers this fact. 
Up to the middle of the eighteenth century Alpine 
scenery was viewed in its horrific, repellent as- 
pects ; and when, a few years later, the poet Gray 
described it as fit stimulus for aesthetic apprecia- 
tion, he struck a new and, as it then seemed, a 
bizarre note. Yet, less than a hundred years 
thereafter, we find Ruskin at his finest of music 
and majesty in hymning the glories of those Swiss 
mountains. Awe has widened the hitherto arbi- 
trarily narrow notion of beauty, and the Plutonian 
forces of Nature are made to minister to spiritual 
ends. Fear — like unto that fear of the Lord which 
is the beginning of wisdom — is as beneficent as joy 
herself. 

But literature, and modern literature in special, 
makes room for other aspects of life besides the 
appealingly pathetic and the awe-inspiring. The 
ugly, and the brutal, and the foul are there in 
crowded cohorts and sickening display. The night 
side of Nature and the devil side of human nature, 
these are portrayed at full length. In the litera- 



52 FORGES IN FICTION 

ture of the past twenty-five years fiction has a bad 
preeminence in this respect, though it may be said 
that the drama has not been very far behind. One's 
attitude toward the unlovely is naturally of much 
consequence to oneself and one's fellow men. Has 
the handling of the degenerate and abnormal — 
manifestations of which are indubitably to be 
found in this third planet from the sun — any 
justification? Is Zola's "Nana" or Daudet's 
"Sappho" a type instructive enough to make her 
acquaintance worth while ? Is Hardy's "Jude the 
Obscure/' not to say the obscene, a man who can 
teach us by his wretched failures some life-lesson 
of value ? At a time when some of the very great- 
est writers alive find a natural expression of their 
power in such scenes and characters as are sug- 
gested by these names, it is imperative for the 
world of thoughtful, educated readers to take a 
stand and have an intelligent opinion upon this 
burning question, condemning with a sweet rea- 
sonableness or approving with a like show of sense. 
We cannot dodge the duty, for the last decade has 
intensified the danger and made the problem more 
intricate. 

Now, let me say with candor that I think even 
here we must not be too sweeping, and cry, "Let 
the ugly be anathema ; it is an evil blot on the fair 
fame of literature." This sort of remark is al- 
ways popular with the gallery, but it is a careless 
generalization. Beyond peradventure the ugly — 
I mean the morally as well as materially ugly — 



THE DARK IN LITERATURE 53 

has a use in literature. There are two ways of 
presenting ethical ideals, of making a spiritual 
impression: one by showing types of virtue, the 
other by showing types of vice. In the former, 
we are made to love the good by direct example; 
in the latter, to hate the bad, and hence to desire 
the good. The methods are respectively positive 
and negative ; the aim is the same, or may be. 

I recall no great English writer who better illus- 
trates the union of these two methods than Eobert 
Browning. Nobody in his senses disputes the 
splendid ethical sanity of this robust seer-singer. 
Yet in poem after poem he paints the ravages of 
sin in the persons of men and women who possess 
a kind of shuddering fascination for the sensitive 
admirer of Browning — "Subtlest assertor of the 
soul in song." Think of the "Soliloquy of the 
Spanish Cloister," with its hideous old monk, his 
heart full of envy and hate ; of such other churchly 
figures as the Bishop who orders his tomb; of 
Porphyria's lover, strangling his sweetheart with 
her golden hair ; of that other woman with golden 
hair, the maiden of Pornic, with her horrible greed 
for money even in the grave; of many another 
light creature with the skin-deep beauty that lures 
men on to hell; of the frank fleshliness of the 
loves of Ottima and Sebald in "Pippa Passes"; 
of the loathsome landscape Childe Eoland was 
forced to look upon ; of the searching cynicism of 
a brief lyric like "Adam, Lilith and Eve" ; and of 
the frank approval of active sin, rather than the 



54 FORCES IN FICTION 

half-hearted willing of sin, in "The Statue and 
the Bust/' 

Think of these and plenty of other Browning 
poems, and realize that this man insisted on the 
dramatic representation of all that is human, 
whether of good or ill. And yet, who does more 
to brace us for the spiritual battle-field? No, 
the test must go deeper than the matter of mate- 
rial or theme; it is the character of the literary 
creator — his aim and ideal — that settles the thing. 
Given the right kind of worker behind the work, 
and no subject, however repulsive, is inadmissible 
to art — at least in the moral view. ^Esthetic 
considerations there may be which put up the bars 
against this or that; but the moral result lies in 
the intention. 

When, as not seldom happens, a namby-pamby 
conventionality .sets up to be sole arbiter of such 
questions, it must be promptly rebuked. I have 
had this truth impressed upon me in reading of 
late the newest product of two living writers of 
international standing, — Tolstoy's novel "Kesur- 
rection," and Ibsen's play, tfr When "We Dead 
Awaken." In the Bussian story the protagonists 
are a harlot on trial for murder and her aristo- 
cratic betrayer. One is asked to spend a large 
part of the time in the government prisons amidst 
the offscouring of the earth. The realism is in- 
sistent, suppressing nothing, telling everything. 
In this respect the book is most inartistic; it 
neglects selection, a cardinal virtue in all art. 



THE DARK IN LITERATURE 55 

I may add, in passing, that Tolstoy's technique 
has always lacked in this respect ; his fellow-coun- 
tryman, Turguenerl, was his superior here. But 
"Kesurrection," in spite of all this, seizes upon 
me — what can we do but make confession of our 
personal experiences in such a case? — as one of 
the noblest and most beautiful works ever put 
forth; hardly a masterpiece, because of its defects, 
but a deeply moving presentment of man's tragi- 
comedy of the years; a wonderful study of a soul 
that returns to the good, that "comes to itself," 
in the matchless words of the Bible ; and a potent 
and eloquent plea for fair dealing between men 
and women and for loving kindness even to crim- 
inals. Tolstoy is a man with the daring naivete 
to try to imitate Christ in his daily life ; and both 
his life and his work exhale an aroma of righteous- 
ness. All his malodorous realism cannot taint those 
airs that blow from God. His purpose shines 
through it like a light through a sunless cavern. 

In Ibsen's drama — a strange, maddeningly mys- 
tic deliverance it is, like most of his work for the ten 
years past — the conventions are played with fast 
and loose, as usual, and to some the piece will do 
little but preach the setting aside of marriage 
vows in the case of elective affinities. Indeed, one 
might almost say of this play that it is Goethe 
come again, with an austere mountain setting and 
a stern suppression of sentimental gush. And yet, 
as I sat rather dazed for some ten minutes after 
closing the volume, and let the message have its 



56 FORGES IN FICTION 

way with me — one of those fractions of time which 
really count in one's intellectual life — I felt that 
there was at least one lesson there for one reader. 
The sculptor who used his beautiful model as a 
model and never loved her as a woman, though 
she had given him her soul, had never truly lived. 
They have both made loveless marriages since ; but 
when they come together again after long years they 
are as the dead, and only awaken when they realize 
what has been lost. In brief, it is an idealist's 
statement of love, a mystic sublimation thereof. 
The play is scarcely healthy, but it possesses a 
tremendous suggestion touching the world's mas- 
ter-passion. 

Caution, then, is the watchword in judging a 
great man's handling of the seamy side of life in 
literature. This applies to many a so-called pur- 
pose novel and problem play of our time, in which 
a daring theme is boldly set forth and a degree 
of frankness is reached disagreeable to those who 
would have their literary path "roses, roses all 
the way." Such swinging of the axe may clear 
the social trail for a more enlightened civilization. 
Fiction like "The Manxman," drama like "The 
Second Mrs. Tanqueray," have a place, I dare 
avouch, within the broad demesne of art. There 
is danger of becoming lax of fibre and limited in 
thought-range when they are forbidden. In the 
broadest sense, the pleasure got from literature is 
in an exhibition of life — an inclusive definition of 
literature being that it is a representation of life 



THE DARK IN LITERATURE 57 

in terms of power and beanty. "Memory," says 
Balzac in a letter to Madame Hanska, "only regis- 
ters thoroughly that which is pain. In this sense 
it recalls great joy, for pleasure comes very near 
to being pain" — a remark in which the modern 
psychologist will heartily agree with the French 
master. The languid, lackadaisical appreciation 
of the sweetly pretty in art is, therefore, a pitiable 
impoverishment of the possibilities of literature. 
Much of the so-called realistic writing of to-day — 
not all of it — can be welcomed as having a genu- 
ine mission for men, if only we will extend our 
conception of its function. 

The dark, we have plead, may be a foil to the 
light, which seems to be God's own use of it; it 
may spur us on to better things by a graphic pic- 
ture of things less excellent. Even if it leave us 
hopelessly sad — as in the quiet, sardonic pessim- 
ism of a fatalist like Hard}', or in a soured re- 
former like Ibsen, wrapping himself round in the 
protective robes of a baffling mysticism — it may 
still be of service in enlarging the sense of life's 
ultimate meaning. It can make us weep tears that 
have a sweet issue in altruistic endeavor, or awe 
us so that never again we break into the "laugh 
mistimed in tragic presences." 

In the last analysis, perhaps, the only insuffer- 
able use of the dark is that which fouls, poisons, 
panders to the base ; and often this is not somber 
at all, but rather speciously glittering and seduc- 
tive, like the gaiety of the "Contes Drolatique," the 



58 FORCES IN FICTION 

alluring voluptuousness of "Mademoiselle de Man- 
pin." In current literature we have, God knows, 
enough of this and to spare. But let us not be 
hasty to condemn that which in its earnest under 
purpose and grim largeness belongs to quite an- 
other category. As in life, so in literature, aim 
and ideal are everything. If they be sane and 
high, it follows, as the night the day, that the 
author "cannot then be false to any man." 

I would thus defend a generous use of the dark 
in literature. We must be athletic enough to en- 
joy it, and thoughtful enough to learn its lessons, 
no more flinching them than we do the lessons of 
life itself. For literature is not merely an escape 
from life, though in some of its idyllic moments 
it may do us minor service of this kind. It is also 
a criticism of life, in Arnold's phrase, or better, 
an interpretation of our days and deeds, so that 
symbol explains fact, and we see not through a 
glass darkly, but, for the nonce, face to face. And, 
with a proper placing of the shadows in the back- 
ground, how lovely is the sunlight, the bird-song, 
the breath of the cheerful open! 

Moral health demands both sides. Burroughs 
gives good advice when he tells the dyspeptic in- 
clined, to get a taste of something bitter in the 
woods. A stalwart idealism — which is the 
only sort wanted — must recognize the di- 
vine in and through the dark; else is our 
light not light, but darkness visible. He who 
with Merlin follows the gleam shall not win 



THE DARK IN LITERATURE 59 

to the Delectable Mountain, save by many 
a Via Dolorosa, crowded thick with sorry 
men and women, through the Bad Lands of doubt, 
agony, sin, and seeming death. It is the price 
paid for coming at the heights; neither life nor 
literature can yield their rich rewards by any 
other bargain. 



POETKY AM) THE DKAMA 

In these days, when there is a marked movement 
toward bringing poetry and the drama together 
for the purpose of reestablishing a literature of 
the stage, it may not be amiss to say a word con- 
cerning their true relations. During the last 
twenty years, under the influence of Ibsen and 
his followers, plays have been written and acted 
in many tongues which made a double appeal ; the 
appeal of drama, something to be heard in the 
theatre; and the appeal of poetry, a book to be 
read at home like other books. The divorce of 
literature and the theatre had been all but univer- 
sal; France alone, since the time of Moliere, hav- 
ing been true to older ideals of dramatic art. In 
English-speaking lands the separation has been so 
complete that many who forget the bygone glories 
of the Elizabethan stage smile at the idea of any 
such rehabilitation as is now slowly occurring. 
Scholars of the cut-and-dried type are slow to 
wake up to the clear change for the better. Thus, 
a recent volume with the stimulating title, <r Later 
English Drama," arousing the hope that here is to 
be discussion of writers such as Pinero, Jones and 
Shaw, stops short with Bulwer Lytton's "Biche- 
lieu" and a single line of contemptuous reference 
to "such authors as T. W. Eobertson, Tom Tay- 
60 



POETRY AND THE DRAMA 61 

lor, Dion Boucicault and W. S. Gilbert" — as if 
the rest was silence. 

But plays are at present being produced by 
Englishmen, if not by Americans, which are for 
reading as well as acting. The dramas of Jones, 
Pinero and Grundy are steadily printed; writers 
like Comyns Carr, Laurence Irving, W. B. Yeats, 
Mrs. Craigie and Stephen Phillips produce poetic 
plays which really get behind the footlights ; while 
novels innumerable are turned into drama-form, 
and when their maker is a man of the standing of 
Hardy, Du Maurier or Barrie, help to spread the 
notion of a literary drama. Even the present re- 
markable vogue of dramatized novels, which is 
sneered at in some quarters as a sign of the un- 
ereative condition of the current drama, has at 
least this use; it serves to suggest to a careless 
public a possible and profitable relation between 
books and the stage, the practicableness of bring- 
ing together fiction and the play. It might be added 
that those who regard this reshaping of stories 
into plays with suspicion, overlook the fact that 
collaboration was the rule rather than the excep- 
tion in Shakspere's day, and that the most of his 
dramas are worked-over stories. 

All this is interesting and encouraging. There 
is reason to think that, more and more, we shall 
see literature pushing its way into the playhouse ; 
and that, conversely, our poetry will take on dra- 
matic form. So far back as in the eighties Mr. 
Stedman made a prophecy to that effect in closing 



62 FORCES IN FICTION 

his study of the American poets; and what has 
happened since justifies him in a measure. I can 
see plainly a desire, which is in several instances 
translated into attempts on the part of the younger 
verse writers in the United States, to make plays 
of poetic quality and yet of dramatic value. The 
tentative work of the late Eichard Hovey is one 
illustration; a recent effort of Mr. William 
Yaughn Moody offers another. These, to be sure, 
are open to the reproach of being unactable; but 
time will teach technique, and the promise is here. 
But one thing in regard to the dramatic uses of 
poetry must be clearly understood and is most 
often overlooked ; namely, the drama can and does 
exist independently of any of the embellishments 
of literature. The latter is an ornament, not a 
necessity. By this I mean that a play can be writ- 
ten which is skillful in construction, powerful in 
situations, brilliant in characterization, without 
having a line in it which deserves to live for its 
form's sake. Nay, we may go further and say 
that an effective play can be constructed with 
no dialogue at all — witness the much-enjoyed 
French pantomime which appeared in this country 
a few years since. Every practical dramatist is 
aware of what a comparatively small function 
words have in the upbuilding of a play, where sev- 
eral pages will be given up to an indication of the 
'^business" and to stage directions, while only a 
single sentence perhaps is spoken by the charac- 
ters. It is well to bear down on this point, be- 



POETRY AND THE DRAMA 03 

cause conventional critics treating the earlier 
periods of the literary drama talk as if a play, to 
be good, must make enjoyable closet reading. 
Nothing is further from the truth. 

It is very instructive to study with this thought 
in mind the Edwin Booth prompt-books of the 
Shakspere plays enacted by that representative 
American tragedian. Booth's attitude toward the 
poet-dramatist was, as is well-known, entirely rev- 
erential; he was a devout student of the dramas 
of the master-genius of our race in literature. He 
would have been the last to countenance the arbi- 
trary garbling and disfigurement of the plays, 
which was not uncommon at the hands of authors 
and actors up to Garrick's time. Yet he did not 
hesitate to excide ruthlessly passage after passage, 
though of the greatest literary value, if they 
seemed to him non-dramatic — ornamental, not 
vital to the action. A couple of examples will 
make this plain. 

In "The Merchant of Venice," Bassanio, in his 
glowing description of Portia, has this golden 
close : 



—"And her sunny locks 
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece; 
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strand, 
And many Jasons come in quest of her." 

No lover of literature would spare these lines; 
yet Booth cut them out. Again, in "Hamlet" I, 
the Queen in her narration of Ophelia's piteous 



64 FORCES IN FICTION 

death — the whole speech being at the top of the 
poetry of pathos — ends in this way : 

"Her clothes spread wide; 
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; 
"Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes; 
As one incapable of her own distress 
Or like a creature native and indued 
Unto that element; but long it could not be 
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, 
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay 
To muddy death." 

Here Booth omits what was doubtless to him a 
most lovely bit of description, but one that too 
long delayed the action at the very conclusion of 
the act. There is, of course, nothing in this pe- 
culiar to Booth; the whole history of the adapta- 
tion of Shakspere's plays to modern conditions 
of the stage illustrates this tendency to sacrifice 
poetical adornment for strict dramatic effect. 
Great moments are to be found in Shakspere, 
as in all dramatic literature of the loftiest kind, 
where matchless poetry and intensest drama of 
the psychologic order unite in a chemical union; 
these passages and scenes mark the culmination of 
dramatic literature. But subservient to the pur- 
poses of dramatic action, poetry, this fair hand- 
maid of the sterner business of drama, must ever 
be. It is a cheap begging of the question to say 
that the reason Shakspere's poetry is suppressed 
and only his drama in the narrower sense retained 
is because poetry has now fallen on evil days, 
whereas in the spacious times of Elizabeth that 



POETRY AND THE DRAMA 65 

highest expression of the imagination met a sym- 
pathetic response. Bather should it be said that 
we now have a clearer conception of the proper 
limits of play-making and realize as never before 
that to block action even by putting beauty in its 
way is bad technique in the drama. It may be 
remarked also that the practical reshaping of 
many Shakspere plays for the purposes of modern 
representation is a further example of the firmer 
dramatic construction of our day, — not necessarily 
an iconoclastic outrage at all. It is true that in 
the stage history of Shakspere we find that un- 
warranted liberties have been taken with his text, 
with his characters, even with the fundamental 
idea of his dramas, so that a play like "King Lear" 
is emasculated by a "happy ending." The period 
of the Eestoration was a chief sinner in this re- 
spect; so late as the eighteenth century an actor- 
manager like Garrick takes undue liberties. But 
the adaptations familiar in our own time are quite 
another matter. The habit is justified by the re- 
sults. The late Mr. Daly's occasional revivals, 
where the dramas were presented intact, and which 
were lauded to the skies for their reverential spirit 
toward the original text, in pleasing contrast with 
the profane handling thereof more often seen, only 
served to strengthen the argument in favor of 
needed changes. Mr. Mansfield's rendition of 
"Henry V" offers a case in point at the present 
writing. One who witnessed his performance with 
the regular text in hand was hard put to it to fol- 



66 FORCES IN FICTION 

low the lines, so freely were scenes pulled about 
and passages excided. Yet it were foolish to deny 
the gain in compression and coherence, this rebuild- 
ing being particularly legitimate in the case of 
one of the history-chronicle plays, which from 
their very nature are more loosely constructed 
than a drama like "Hamlet"' or "Lear" or "Mac- 
beth," where a deep psychologic significance draws 
the parts together in a more than molecular mar- 
riage. The reader will find a further treatment 
of this improvement in dramatic technique in the 
following essay. 

This fact of the separate aim of literature and 
the drama is no argument against their union. 
Though independent, they make the strongest of 
allies. But it does suggest a caution against 
sneering at the so-called unliterary drama, which, 
if well done in. accordance with the laws of stage- 
craft, is admirable and fulfills its immediate pur- 
pose. Ah, yes, its immediate purpose ; therein lies 
the criticism. If the playwright would do more 
than succeed at once ; if he would be treasured in 
after days, let him do as did Shakspere and his 
fellows, Congreve and the Restoration men, Sheri- 
dan and Goldsmith in the last century: and as 
Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Sudermann, 
Rostand and Stephen Phillips are doing in our 
own time; let him, in addition to human interest 
and technical structure, bedeck the play in the fair 
garments of poetry, be jewel it, as it were, with the 
ideal, and present the more impassioned moments 



POETRY AND THE DRAMA 67 

of character in language that is fittingly poetic 
because at such times life itself becomes lyrical, 
heroic, dramatic in a noble sense. For it must be 
remembered that poetry is, after all, more than 
ornament; it is stuff of the very essence of a mo- 
ment when life is at its keenest and highest and 
broadest. There is a poetry of situation on the 
stage irrespective of language; and when the 
words used are proper to the scene they are far 
more than decoration, being rather the permanent 
registration through the expressional medium of 
speech of what were otherwise a fleeting sight — 
part of a play that has its run and then ceases 
to be — perhaps forever. The strongest plea for 
the union of poetry and the stage is, then, that 
the poetry that is in action in the interrelations 
of human beings must be fine-languaged to get 
itself all-expressed and long-preserved. Then shall 
the play-makers be praised within the theatre and 
also be read with delight; and shall be names 
for children's children to conjure with. The 
signs are not few that this laudable marriage of 
play and poetry is taking place once more in our 
time, late illustrations being furnished by Ste- 
phen Phillips' striking dramatic rehabilitation 
of the old but immortally beautiful Francesca da 
Eimini story and his boldly fine handling of a 
biblical motive in "Herod." 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF TECHNIQUE IN 
THE DRAMA 

The truth that the drama is a form of literature 
having its own technique seems obvious enough. 
Yet if one may judge by many attempts at play- 
making and much literary criticism, it is a fact 
so occult as to have escaped general observation. 
It is only of late, with the great demand for the 
turning of alleged dramatic fiction into play form, 
that novelists as a class have come to accept the 
idea that the art of fiction is one, that of the stage 
another. Too often in the past has it been as- 
sumed that because a piece of fiction is what we 
call "dramatic," it will surely make a strong 
play; that a situation in a novel can be trans- 
planted bodily for use upon the boards. Every 
year still the failures of dramatised fiction are 
to be explained by this assumption. There is in 
the growing practice of calling on collaborating 
dramatists of practical experience for help, a sig- 
nificant admission by authors that the lack of such 
knowledge is likely to be fatal. The difference 
in the respective methods of fiction and the drama 
is, as a matter of fact, almost as great as that 
between essay and poetry. 

The indiscriminating praise of Shakspere, 
master poet of the race, reveals the same tendency 

68 



TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 69 

to overlook this fundamental distinction. It has 
become the most threadbare of commonplace to 
allow to him all the claims possible to be filed by a 
maker of literature. It is a matter of course to 
deal only in superlatives when discoursing on the 
Stratford man. Hence has grown up a habit, 
careless with those who know better, and ignorant 
and mistaken in the case of critics who do not 
think for themselves, — the habit of confusing the 
technique of the Elizabethan dramatists, inclusive 
of Shakspere, with the splendid poetry which 
adorned that stage and makes it unique in En- 
glish literature. 

Shakspere was confronted with the tremendous 
task of establishing the art of play-writing in 
England; in view of what he found when he be- 
gan, he performed a miracle in leaving dramatic 
technique what it was when he had rounded out 
his mighty play-cycle with the romances, "Cymbe- 
line," "The Winter's Tale," and "The Tempest." 
To appreciate this, however, it is necessary to read 
and digest the precedent attempts at play litera- 
ture : the crude, coarse comedies of "Kalph Eoister 
Doister" and "Gammer Gurton's Needle;" the 
frigid lifelessness of "Gorbudoc," with its slavish 
imitation of the Senecan models; the vital but 
often childishly ineffective and shapeless tragedies 
of Marlowe; — to say nothing of the tentative 
efforts of men like Peele, Greene, Kyd and Nash. 
In comparison, Shakspere's plays seem to leap 
Cadmus-like at the creative word into full strength. 



70 FORCES IN FICTION 

But this is all relative. Looking back, one sees that 
the poet-player founded modern dramatic method 
and clothed it on with a splendor unsurpassed ; but 
looking forward towards our own time, and think- 
ing of play-making as such, he is to be recognized 
as a very great journeyman learning to use his 
tools, gradually sloughing off excrescences inevit- 
able to the artistic beginnings of any literary 
craft ; in few, he exhibits a progressive mastery of 
technique marvellous for his day but falling short 
in many ways of the perfection of dramatic art 
which was to be reached in the evolution of over 
three hundred years. In the creation of character, 
in the poetic interpretation of human life, Shak- 
spere stands alone ; but in the manipulation of the 
play-form for the purposes of dramatic exposition, 
he has been left far behind. The technique of an 
Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Pinero, a Gillette, is far 
superior, if by technique be meant the adaptation 
of means to a certain end. This sort of remark 
is commonly heard when intelligent students come 
together for talk, and yet are they cautious of 
saying it in print. Yet surely it is no detraction 
from Shakspere's genius to make the point. To 
deny it is to call Shakspere not a man but a god, 
and (which is worse) to set aside one of the car- 
dinal principles of all fruitful literary criticism; 
namely, that literature is a growth, and that even 
genius has its relation to environment, its limita- 
tions of time and place. 
A certain class of minds takes particular satisf ac- 



TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 71 

tion in pooh-poohing art and emphasizing person- 
ality. Shakspere, it holds, conld create dramatic 
technique about as easily as he could write peer- 
less blank verse. One who adopts this as a work- 
ing hypothesis in the study of literature — or of 
any art — will get in a sad muddle. Its violation 
of the idea of literature as an organic growth, not 
a fortuitous combination of human atoms, makes 
it untenable in a day when the evolutionary prin- 
ciple is so firmly founded. 

But how, it may be asked, have plays gained so 
wonderfully as to make the best modern drama 
more admirable than that of the early giants? 
What are the improvements which mark technique 
to-day and often make a play an example of fine 
art? A study of English stage literature from 
the late sixteenth century to the present furnishes 
the answer. I shall try to point out a few of the 
significant changes, the substantial gains. 

To bring many particulars under a common 
denominator, it may be said that the improve- 
ment in dramatic method since the Elizabethans 
has all been in the direction of greater truth in 
the portrayal of life; almost all the changes have 
been in the interests of vraisemblance. Little by 
little, outworn devices, antiquated conventions, 
originally useful but eventually lacking life, 
clumsy attempts to depict what was not demanded 
by the dramatic necessity, and features which were 
in reality only admitted because of a confusion of 
dramatic form with such other forms as romance 



72 FORGES IN FICTION 

or epic were all dropped under a clearer apprehen- 
sion of the essential purpose of drama, — the tell- 
ing of a story by characters in action and within 
definitely circumscribed material bounds. 

Shakspere himself was a pioneer in this reform; 
he ridded the stage of many of the imperfections 
which were clogging the development of English 
drama. He greatly reduced the role of the rhym- 
ing couplet in tragedy, thereby freeing the spirit 
of poetry from a narrow and unnatural conven- 
tion. He breathed the breath of life under the 
stark ribs of blank verse by breaking up the full 
line into the irregular dialogue which imitated 
the very quiver of human nature. A glance at the 
pre-Shaksperean tragedy with its absurdly unnat- 
ural regularity of verse movement will make this 
plain. He excised the rambling episodic matter 
which made those earlier plays a lumber room of 
loose unrelated material. He went far towards 
eliminating the chorus, the masque, and dumb- 
show features that, however attractive in them- 
selves, were as millstones checking the free play of 
drama. He broke up the acts of the play into 
scenes, thereby showing a sense of the drama as 
tableau, something consisting of successive stage 
pictures that must compose even as a picture 
"composes." He destroyed the tyranny of the 
classic writers which up to his coming fairly 
choked dramatic action and motive. By introduc- 
ing comedy into drama whose ground plan was 



TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 73 

tragic, he produced an effect of reality never be- 
fore secured, — a change iconoclastic to a degree 
now difficult to appreciate. He began to denote 
"misiness" and to insert stage directions, his work 
in this respect being but tentative, a step in the 
right path. Students having in hand one of the 
many modern editions of Shakspere with their full 
equipment in the way of change of scene, stage 
direction, and business, and all that goes to the 
explication of the text, would do well to look at 
a fac-simile reproduction of the First Folio of 
1623 in order to realize how much has been added 
by the editorial supervision of well-nigh three 
centuries. But the main fact is, that Shakspere' s 
contributions to the advancement, indeed the 
founding of dramatic technique, have been many 
and remarkable. 

Nevertheless, the English drama as he left it 
and as it was handled by the late and post-Eliza- 
bethans was full of defects and even absurdities. 
It was loosely constructed, for one important thing. 
There was a lack of unity which strikes the pres- 
ent-day student with astonishment when he ex- 
amines even a masterpiece by Shakspere and finds 
that it is easy to shift the order of the scenes to the 
improvement of the action, a closer-knit and more 
sequential effect being produced. The loose ar- 
rangement of the scenes in an Elizabethan play 
can be explained in two ways; in the first place, in 
many dramas, especially the chronicle history plays 
of which "Kichard III" and "Henry V" are ex- 



74 FORCES IN FICTION 

cellent illustrations, the principal aim was to offer 
a series of more or less loosely related spectacles, 
each effective in itself ; the author cared less about 
an organic story. The second and chief reason 
lies in the physical conditions of the stage of that 
time, the very lack of scenery making scenes pos- 
sible. For when such a scenic change does not call 
for new scenery, there is no managerial objection 
to it; whereas, if every change means a consider- 
able financial outlay, the ambitious playwright 
will find himself at loggerheads with the practical 
man of the theatre. It is in such material facts 
that the multiplicity of scenes in many Eliza- 
bethan dramas — as high as ten or a dozen to an 
act in some instances — has its origin, a crude 
sense of art also helping to bring about such a re- 
sult. Pass from such plays to a late modern 
example, and you will find an Ibsen rarely allow- 
ing more than two scenes to an act ; while Bernard 
Shaw, who is an extremist in the simplification 
and perfecting of stage technique, regularly makes 
the scene co-extensive with the act. 

The later Elizabethan drama was also notable 
for its monstrosities of plot. Shakspere, though 
avoiding the worst of them, did not hesitate to 
make use of the conventions which sacrificed the 
sense of realities, as in his treatment of sex dis- 
guises so common from the time of an early piece 
like "Two Gentlemen of Verona." In a genuinely 
strong play like "The Merchant of Venice" the veri- 
similitude is greatly injured by the assumption 



TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 75 

that Portia in her charming lawyer's robes really 
hides her identity; as a matter of fact, her per- 
sonality is no more cloaked than is that of a girl 
college student who as Commencement draws near 
dons her Oxford gown and so lends a piquant 
touch to the June campus. This example may 
serve to stand for numerous concessions on Shaks- 
pere's part to stage traditions antagonistic to the 
truthful interpretation of life in the theater. It 
should be remembered, too, that the custom of 
boy actors for the woman parts introduced further 
complications and concessions. Shakspere's worst 
lapse in this matter or in other departures from 
truth were as nothing compared with such a con- 
geries of wild and fantastic horrors as is to be 
met with in Webster's "Duchess of Main/' — a play, 
which contains, notwithstanding, poetry as mag- 
nificent as can be found in the whole range of 
Elizabethan drama. The tendency of the post- 
Elizabethans in this matter of realism of incident 
and character and the skillful adjustment of 
action to end, was swiftly downhill. 

But with the drama of the Eestoration came an 
improvement. There was a loss of poetry, of 
the imaginative appeal to the abiding interests 
and passions. But in technique, and given their 
object, the plays of Congreve and his mates cer- 
tainly show an advance, — a dialogue notably bet- 
ter in lifelikeness and a far abler handling of the 
story, which often is so clearly articulated that 
effect flows from cause without hitch or violation 



76 FORCES IN FICTION 

of truth. To explain the brilliant reflection of 
social manners seen in the best known dramas of 
Goldsmith and Sheridan, one must read the earlier 
plays of Congreve, Farquhar, Yan Brugh and 
Wycherly. By the time the Eestoration period is 
reached, we have dispensed with much extraneous 
matter common with the Elizabethans : the inter- 
polated dumb show, the purely undramatic masque, 
the common use of long descriptive passages 
which, however beautiful, clogged action and the 
display of character; the clumsy introduction of 
the supernatural, as in the closing act of "Cymbe- 
line." Obviously, a part of this change is due to 
the very different nature of the later drama, which 
is a comedy of manners where before was romantic 
tragedy. We have left the world which labors 
and loves in the noble sense for the little corrupt 
world of town intrigue and pleasure. But beyond 
doubt a main reason is the increased sense of what 
the dramatic requirements are. Dryden's criticism 
of the stage and stage literature gives valuable tes- 
timony to this keener appreciation in his day of 
the methods of play-writing that is intended for 
stage representation. 

Furthermore, it were absurd to suppose that 
with the eighteenth century — including such de- 
lightful and familiar productions as "She Stoops 
to Conquer" and "The School for Scandal"— the 
last word in the evolution of dramatic method was 
spoken. The aim in those dramas was the exposi- 
tion of social types and customs, — a satiric inten- 



TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 7? 

tion; hence brilliant dialogue and clearcut por- 
traiture within definitely prescribed limits. But 
the story invented to carry these characteristics is, 
compared with the ingenious inventions of later 
playwrights and the vital imaginings of a few, 
thin, slight and not seldom unconvincing enough. 
An impression of talk at the expense of action is 
conveyed, overcome partially, at least, in our day 
by casting the piece with such capable actors that 
their superb art makes us forget defects of com- 
position. Yet the Bancrofts in London, con- 
fronted by these facts, did not hesitate to edit 
"The School for Scandal." In witnessing the fa- 
mous screen scene in that drama, it is impossible 
not to feel the conventionality and flimsiness of the 
situation, if one will but fix the mind on the play 
rather than upon the acting itself. All this comes 
out clearly in a performance of the play by ama- 
teurs; there is little in the piece to carry it of 
itself. It needs resourceful players; whereas, 
Pinero's "Sweet Lavender," or Grundy's "A Pair 
of Spectacles" are comedies which give pleasure if 
enacted by high school students. Indifferent or 
bad acting cannot kill them. 

The complete disappearance of the chorus, an- 
other classic tradition often used by Shakspere, 
is a mark of modern work that has its significance. 
It means that for strict dramatic purposes, com- 
ment, no matter if it be the beautiful lyric com- 
ment of the Attic drama, is an excrescence. The 
theory of dramatic art which admits of choragic 



78 FORCES IN FICTION 

interpolation is entirely contrary to present-day 
ideas. If the aim be poetic justice in the interpre- 
tation of life, this custom may still be defended; 
the Japanese use it now in their drama. But with 
the stern insistence on action as the kernel of 
drama, it had to go, to the palpable advantage of 
dramatic effect. But the crowds in the background 
of melodramas and historical tragedies and some- 
times of romantic comedies, clusters of people who 
shout in unison or become vocal through a spokes- 
man, are plainly a survival of the Greek chorus. 
It is instructive, therefore, to notice how they are 
got rid of in the best constructed current drama. 
Of course in historical plays and all dramas of 
strong scenic possibilities the supernumerary is 
more likely to appear and has a sort of justifica- 
tion as picturesque accessory. But on the whole 
the most masterly drama of to-day handles this 
attenuated chorus gingerly if at all. Its free use 
even in the spectacular play- work of a Sardou now 
makes an impression of old-fashionedness. 

The cutting out of episodic material is an im- 
portant element in this bettering of technique. 
The so-called induction of the Elizabethans is ill 
tolerated at present ; only as the prologue in plays 
sensationally incident-full. The Christopher Sly 
episode in Shakspere's "Taming of the Shrew' 
is a case in point. In most modern representa- 
tions it is omitted; in that, for example, made 
familiar to Americans by the Daly company. In 
the staging of the piece by Miss Ada Kehan this 



TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 79 

induction was restored, no doubt to the amuse- 
ment of the audiences which enjoyed the unctuous 
humor of the scene, but just as truly to the detri- 
ment of the main action ; for the purpose of a first 
act, — to begin the story, — is obscured when the 
mind is thus started on a wrong scent, however 
attractive the game. A sense of irritation is pro- 
duced on the realization that here is a play within 
a play without Hamlet's excuse. Spencer's law of 
the economy of attention would explain the wrong 
to dramatic construction here done. 

The general adjustment of costume to imper- 
sonation during the development of the drama 
was but an outward and visible sign of that gen- 
eral approximation to life itself on the stage al- 
ready explained. With the Elizabethans, veri- 
similitude of dress, like verisimilitude of scenery, 
was little sought. Money was spent freely at 
times, especially on court masques and revels. 
More money was paid for a velvet cloak than for 
the copyright of a play. But the sense of his- 
torical accuracy or the desire to copy social exter- 
nals hardly existed. Wild absurdities of costume 
are to be noted in all stages of the English drama 
from the morality plays to the modern period; so 
late as the eighteenth century the dresses of the 
ladies in a classical play were wholly of the age of 
powder and patches. There was likewise small 
demand at first for that truth of dialogue which 
means that each person of the play shall properly 
pronounce words suitable to his or her station, 



SO FORCES IX FICTION 

dialectic variations from normal English being 
given with exquisite exactitude and great skill by 
the players. The rendering of the rustic speech 
of New England in a play like Heme's "Shore 
Acres," of that of the South in Mr. Thomas's "Ala- 
bama" or of provincial England in "Tess" is so 
far superior to the clumsy phonetics of the early 
drama as to take on the importance of a new art. 
Compare with the best examples of this care in 
the reproduction of speech on the stage, the at- 
tempt in Shakspere's "Henry V" to give the dia- 
lects of the Welsh, Irish and Scotch soldiers, and a 
realization of the difference, the immense progress, 
will be gained. 

Truth of scene has gone hand in hand with 
truer costume and speech in the modern play. 
The illusion wrought by placing the dramatis 
personae in a congruous environment, is a very 
great aid in impressing the auditor with a sense 
of life. The objections so often urged against the 
elaborateness of modern scenery are all aimed at 
the abuse of a good thing, — the overwhelming of 
action by ornament. To argue, as some critics do, 
that there might have been more appeal to the 
imagination — and hence as a result more appre- 
ciation of dramatic poetry, — in the bare acces- 
sories of the Elizabethan stage, seems to be a 
scholar's fad rather than a reasonable objection to 
such stage-setting as shall make for illusion. The 
consideration of a play as, among other things, a 
pictorial appeal, has its psychological side. In a 



TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 81 

recent paper, Mr. Thomas, a well known native 
playwright, dilated upon the modern dramatist's 
recognition of the necessity of carefully studied 
color schemes in the successive scenes of a play, 
relative to the nature of the drama itself : making 
the point that a play might be made or marred ac- 
cording as the dramatist kept this requirement in 
mind. Many such a finesse is given due weight 
in latter day dramatic technique. 

One of the most persistent of stage conventions 
is the "aside ;" its effect is always to destroy illu- 
sion, and in plays of our day whenever it is used 
the auditor simply concedes to the playwright a 
departure from realism for the sake of conven- 
ience. To speak lines nominally sotto voce in such 
tones as shall be heard from every seat of a large 
theater and are yet ex hypothesi not overheard by 
sundry persons on the stage, is an absurdity only 
tolerated for its supposed helpfulness in explain- 
ing the situation or explicating the plot. In the 
best modern dramas the "aside" is coming to be 
used more and more charily; by Ibsen, for in- 
stance, in his social satires. In an occasional play 
—this is true of William Gillette's "Held By The 
Enemy," "Secret Service," and "Sherlock Holmes" 
— this time-honored device is entirely dispensed 
with. The additional demand on the author's 
ingenuity is apparent, but the gain in truthful- 
ness and so in strength of impression, well repays 
the effort. It is safe to say that modern technique 
will fast eliminate the "aside." 



82 FORCES IN FICTION 

Much the same evolution may be traced in the 
matter of the soliloquy. But here a complete 
abandonment of a stage trick which is inimical 
to lifelikeness, is harder and slower, for there is 
a certain psychologic justification for it, not 
found at all in the case of the "aside." People 
think out their situations when alone, and to give 
those thoughts vocal utterance is a pardonable 
objectifying of a common subjective experience. 
Moreover, people actually do soliloquize when 
under mental or emotional strain; many of us 
know this from our own habit. Still, clever play- 
wrights to-day are reducing the role of the solil- 
oquy in a marked way, and now and then its total 
disappearance in a play is to be chronicled. Here 
again Mr. Gillette is in the van, his dramas al- 
ready mentioned being constructed without a con- 
cession to a convention which in Shakspere is in- 
wrought with the very texture of the dramaturgic 
effect. 

The reduction in the number of the persons of 
the play and the simplification of the act divisions 
are still other tendencies of modern technique. 
Glance at a typical Ibsen drama and see how pre- 
vailingly the piece is cast for six or eight parts. 
In "Ghosts" the number is but five ; which is also 
true of English playwrights like Pinero. Com- 
pare this restriction with the Elizabethan habit. 
The contrast is startling. The exceptions to this 
rule are found in historical dramas like Eostand's 
"L'Aiglon" with its fifty and more persons; or 




TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 83 

Sardous "Kobespierre," with hardly a less number. 
In these there is really a reversal to older 
methods, — a tendency in the last named plays ex- 
tending to the use of six acts. The evolution in 
the habit of division into acts has been steadily 
towards a reduction of the number. With the 
Greeks the play fell into episodes rather than into 
acts in the modern sense. Nowadays, while the 
old distribution into five acts allowing for the in- 
troduction, growth, height, fall and catastrophe 
is still found in heavy tragedy, comedy has shrunk 
to a customary three acts, and tragedy that deals 
with contemporary persons and scenes either to 
three or four, with a preference in romantic plays 
with heavily dramatic situations for four. Nor 
is this change arbitrary. It indicates a feeling for 
simplification which recognizes the tripartite life 
in a properly built play, it being a creature hav- 
ing a beginning, middle, and end, the additional 
act being in reality a subdivision of the second act. 
Since this scheme of construction is fundamental, 
it seems likely that technique will come to settle on 
three acts as the normal arrangement, a departure 
therefrom being due to special needs or restric- 
tions — as in the case of the historical play which, 
like the historical novel, has a method all its own. 
Even from this rapid coup d'ceil at the devel- 
opment of dramatic technique it can be under- 
stood that we have here a healthy growth which 
has now reached a high degree of perfected art. 
To turn the back on present-day play-making as 



84 FORCES IN FICTION 



if it had no interest, the dramatic glories of the 
past being alone worth while, is a foolish phase of 
conservatism. It arises in part from the confusion 
of two separate things, drama and literature, 
which, however happy in their marriage, are inde- 
pendent organisms. It is one of the encouraging 
signs of current drama that along with an im- 
mense improvement in technique, is now to be 
noted such cultivation of the literary aspects of 
the play, as is giving the stage dramas enjoyable 
not only in actual presentation but for private 
reading. If we may never again expect the 
creative genius of a Shakspere, surely we have 
some compensation in the truthful portrayal of 
human life on the stage and in the abler manipu- 
lation of stage artifice to bring about that very 
desirable result. 



THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 

It is odd that while the essay as a distinctive 
form in modern literature is so well cherished and 
enjoyable, it has received so little of expert atten- 
tion. Books upon the drama, upon poetry in its 
many phases, upon the novel even — a thing com- 
paratively of but yesterday — are as leaves on 
Vallombrosa for number; but books on the essay 
— where are they? It is high time the natural 
history of the essay was written, for here is a 
fascinating literary development which has had a 
vigorous, distinguished life of more than three 
hundred years in English and which counts 
among its cultivators some of the abiding names 
in our native literature. Here is a form, too, in- 
teresting because of its inter-filiations with such 
other forms as fiction which is connected with it 
by the bridge of the character-sketch; drama, 
whose dialogue the essay not seldom uses; and 
such later practical offshoots as the newspaper 
editorial and the book review. 

This neglect of the essay is not altogether in- 
explicable. Scholars have been shy of it, I fancy, 
in part at least, because on the side of form (the 
natural and proper side to consider in studying 
the historical evolution of a literary genre) it has 
been thus fluent and expansive: a somewhat sub- 
95 



86 FORCES IN FICTION 

tie, elusive thing. We can say, obviously, that an 
essay is a prose composition, but can we be more 
explicit than this rather gross mark of identifica- 
tion? The answer is not so easy. Moreover, the 
question has become further confused by a change 
in the use and meaning of the word within a 
century. A cursory glance at the history of the 
English essay will make this plain. 

Lord Bacon was, by his own statement, fond of 
that passed 'master of the essay in French, Mon- 
taigne. It is small wonder then that, when at the 
end of the sixteenth century he put a name to his 
"dispersed meditations," he called them essays, 
after the Frenchman, using the word for the first 
time in our tongue. Not the name only but the 
thing was new. The form was slight, the ex- 
pression pregnant and epigrammatic; there was 
no attempt at' completeness. The aim of this 
early prince of essayists was to be suggestive 
rather than exhaustive — the latter a term too 
often synonymous with exhausting. Bacon's 
essays imply expanded note-book jottings ; indeed, 
he so regarded them. In the matter of style, one 
has but to read contemporaries like Sidney, Lyly 
and Hooker, to see to what an extent Lord Bacon 
modernized the cumbersome, though often cloud- 
ily splendid, Elizabethan manner. He clarified 
and simplified the prevailing diction, using 
shorter words and crisper sentences with the re- 
sult of closer knit, more sententious effect. In a 
word, Style became more idiomatic, and the re- 



THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 87 

lation of author and reader more intimate in the 
hands of this Elizabethan essay-maker. The point 
is full of significance for the history of this al- 
luring form; its development ever since has been 
from this initiative. Slight, casual, rambling, 
confidential in tone, the manner much, the theme 
unimportant in itself, a mood to be vented rather 
than a thought to add to the sum of human 
knowledge; the frank revelation of a personality 
— such have been and are the head marks of the 
essay down to the present day. This fact is some- 
what obscured by our careless use of the word at 
present to denote the formal paper, the treatise: 
the current definition of the essay admits this ex- 
tension, and of course we bandy the word about in 
such meaning. But it is well to remember that 
the central idea of this form is what removes it 
forever from the treatise, from any piece of writ- 
ing that is formal, impersonal and communicative 
of information. Little was done for the develop- 
ment of the essay, after Bacon, during the seven- 
teenth century. But with Addison, Steele and the 
Spectator in the early eighteenth, the idea is re- 
inforced and some of the essential features of this 
form brought the more clearly out. The social, 
chatty quality of the true essayist is emphasized; 
the writer enters into more confidential relations 
with his reader than ever he did with the stately 
Verulam; and the style approaches more nearly 
to the careless, easy elegance of the talk of good, 
but not stiff society. The Spectator papers un- 



88 FORCES IN FICTION 

questionably did more to shape the mold of essay 
writing in English than any other influence; at 
the same time, to speak as if Mr. Bickerstaff 
originated the form (as some critics do), is to 
overlook its origin with Bacon. The essay idea — 
this colloquial, dramatic, esoteric, altogether 
charming sort of screed, was cultivated quite 
steadily through the eighteenth century. It be- 
came, as a rule, more ponderous in the hands of 
Johnson and was in danger of taking on a didac- 
tic, hortatory tone foreign to its nature ; yet occa- 
sionally in the "Kambler" papers, Johnson takes 
on a lightness of touch and tone that is surpris- 
ing and suggests that we have perhaps regarded 
the dictator as too exclusively a wielder of ses- 
quipedalian words. That this God of the Coffee 
House had a clear and correct idea of the essay 
is shown by his own description of it: "A loose 
sally of the mind," he says, "an irregular, indi- 
gested piece, not a regular and orderly perform- 
ance." 

Goldsmith, a light-horse soldier in contrast with 
Johnson, full panoplied and armed cap-a-pie, 
broadened the essay for literary and social discus- 
sion, although Grub Street necessity led him at 
times to become encyclopedic; and he was never 
happier than when, as in "TheEevery at the Boar's 
Head" he played upon some whimsical theme, 
pizzicato, surcharging it with his genial person- 
ality. Minor writers, too, in the late eighteenth 
century had a hand in the development; none 



THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 89 

more so, to my mind, than the letter and fiction 
makers, Chesterfield and Walpole, Lady Mary 
Wortley Montagu and Fanny Burney — these and 
that inimitable fuss and chronicler, Boswell. If 
one would know how SPciety talked in the second 
half of that Tea Cup century, one must read — not 
the dialogue of the novelists where the art is too 
new to have caught quite the accent of life, but 
these off-hand epistles dashed off without a 
thought of print — to print were half way vulgar 
then — and hence possessing all the freshness and 
naturalness of life itself, — the ideal essay note. 
We may be thankful that as yet the habit of pub- 
lishing everything, from one's thrills to one's table 
tastes, had not gained popularity, — those ladies 
and gentlemen could afford to be charmingly un- 
reserved in their private correspondence. To-day 
in the very act of penning a note, intrudes the 
horrid thought that it may be incorporated as an 
integral part of one's "works." 

The Letter, as a literary form, offers an inter- 
esting line of side inquiry in connection with the 
essay; it has influenced that form beyond doubt, 
is in a sense contributory to it. In the same way 
dialogue — a modern instance like Landor comes to 
mind — has had its share in shaping so protean a 
form. 

But it was reserved for the nineteenth century 
to contribute in the person of Charles Lamb the 
most brilliant exemplar of the essay, prince of 
this special literary mood; not primarily a 



90 FORCES IN FICTION 

thinker, a knowledge-bringer, a critic, but just a 
unique personality expressing his ego in his own 
fascinating way, making the past pay rich toll, 
yet always himself; and finding the essay accom- 
modative of his whimsical vagaries, his delicious 
inconsistencies, his deep-toned, lovable nature. 
And that incomparable manner of his! 'Tis at 
once richly complex and tremulously simple; an 
instrument of wide range from out whose keys a 
soul vibrant to the full meaning of humanity 
might call spirits of earth and heaven in exquisite 
evocations and cadences at times almost too pierc- 
ing sweet. Turn to the Elia papers and see 
how perfectly this magic of Lamb's illustrates and 
supports the qualities of mood and form i am 
naming as typical of the essay as an historic 
growth. The themes, how desultory, audacious, 
trivial, even grotesque. The only possible justi- 
fication for a dissertation on roast pig is the paper 
itself. Xote, too, how brief some of the choicest 
essays are; half a dozen small pages, even less; 
and with what seeming carelessness they vary, 
stretching themselves at will to four times their 
normal length. Study the construction of any 
famous essay to see if it can be called close-knit, 
organic, and you shall find a lovely disregard of 
any such intention. The immortal Mrs. Battle 
on whist gives a capital example. If you turn to 
the end of that inimitable deliverance, you will 
find it to contain one of the most charming digres- 
sions in all literature. Lamb leaves that deli- 



THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 91 

cious old gentlewoman for a moment to speak of 
Cousin Bridget, Bridget Elia, the tragic sister 
Mary of his house, and playfully, tenderly, pictur- 
ing their game at cards, forgets all else and never 
returns to Mrs. Battle. But who cares? Is not 
lack of organic connection (to call it by so harsh 
a name) more than justified by that homely- 
heartful picture of Charles and Mary Lamb, bent 
over their "mere shade of play," — a game not for 
shillings but for fun — nay, for love. "Bridget 
and I should be ever playing," says he, and the 
reader is charmed and stirred clean out of all 
thought of Mrs. Battle. It is ever so with your 
essayist to the manner born! to wander and 
digress is with him a natural right. He is never 
happier than when he is playing mad pranks with 
logic, respectability and the mother tongue. Yet 
should his temperament be sensitive, his nature 
broad, deep and noble. The querulous-gentle 
Elia was surely of this race. 

To turn from Lamb to any contemporary is an 
effect of anticlimax. None other was like to him 
for quality. Yet Hazlitt and Hunt were his 
helpers, doing good work in extending the gamut 
of this esoteric mood in literature. DeQuincy, too, 
though losing the essay touch again and again be- 
cause of didacticism and a sort of formal, stately 
eloquence, wrote papers in the true tradition of 
the essayist. Passages in the "Opium Eater" are 
of this peculiar tone and that great writer's in- 
tense subjectivity is always in his favor — since 



92 FORCES IN FICTION 

the genuine essay-maker must be frankly an 
egoist. Hunt is at times so charming, so light of 
touch, so atmospheric in quality that he deserves 
to be set high among essayists of the early century. 
A man who could produce such delicately graceful 
vignette work as his sketches of the Old Lady and 
the Old Gentleman, was a true commensal of 
Lamb. In such bits of writing the mood and 
manner are everything, the theme is naught; the 
man back of the theme is as important in the pro- 
duction of the essay as is the man back of the 
gun in warfare. Herein lies Hunt's chief claim 
on our grateful remembrance — here, and in cer- 
tain of his verses, rather than in the more elab- 
orate papers to be found in such a volume as 
"Fancy and Imagination." 

But already we must begin to recognize in 
writers like Hunt, Hazlitt and DeQuincy, and 
still more in latter men, a tendency distinctly 
modern and on the whole antagonistic to the pe- 
culiar virtues of the esoteric essa} T , the causerie of 
literature. It is moving fast toward the objec- 
tive, rounded out, formally arranged treatise. It 
becomes argumentative, critical, acquisitive, 
logical, expository, laden with thought. Hence 
when we reach masters like Euskin, Carlyle, 
Arnold, we see what is natural to them as essay- 
ists in one sense deflected into other (and no 
doubt quite as welcome) forms; one and all, they 
have messages, and missions. Now your bona fide 
essayist has nothing of the kind ; he would simply 



THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 93 

button-hole you for a half hour while he talks 
garrulously, without a thought of purpose, about 
the world — and himself — especially the latter. 
Splendid blooms grow from out the soil which 
gives us our Ruskins and Carlyles; but when we 
are considering this sensitive plant of the literary 
garden, the essay, it were well to agree that it is 
another thing, and to save for its designation the 
word essay. Nor is this to deny essay touches, 
essay moments, essay qualities to Euskin or 
Carlyle; it is only to make the point that their 
strenuous aim and habitual manner, so far as they 
went, were against the production of a very dif- 
ferent kind of literature. 

Earlier American literature has at least sup- 
plied one real essayist to the general body of Eng- 
lish literature, — the genial Irving, who was 
nurtured on the best eighteenth century models 
and carried on the tradition of the Spectator and 
Goldsmith in papers which have just the desired 
tone of genteel talk, the air of good society. There 
are hints in Benjamin Franklin that had politics 
not engulfed him, as they afterward did Lowell, 
he might have shown himself to the essay born. 
Irving is sometimes spoken of as a fictionist, but 
all his stories have the essay mood and manner; 
and he had the good sense practically never to 
abandon that gentle genre. His work always 
possesses the essay touch both in description and 
in the hitting off of character, thus offering an 
illustration of the fact that the essay, by way of 



94 FORCES IN FICTION 

the character sketch, debouches upon the broad 
and beaten highway of the novel, — the main road 
of our modern literature. There are plenty of Irv- 
ing's papers which it is rather puzzling to name 
as essay or fiction ; i 'The Fat Gentleman/ ' for ex- 
ample. A later and very true American essayist, 
Dr. Holmes, furnishes the same puzzle in the 
Autocrat series: they have dialogue, dramatic 
characterization, even some slight story interest. 
Why not fiction then? Because the trail of the 
genuine essayist is everywhere : the characters, the 
dramatic setting, are but devices for the freer ex- 
pression of Dr. Holmes's own delightful person- 
ality, which, as lEr. Howells testifies, Holmes liked 
to objectify. It is our intimate relation with him 
that we care about in converse with the essayist 
born; we sit down to enjoy his views. The fic- 
tionisf s purpose, contrariwise, is to show life in a 
representative section of it and with dramatic in- 
terplay of personalities moving to a certain 
crescendo of interest called the climax. 

And so Dr. Holmes remains one of our most 
distinctive and acceptable essayists of the social 
sort — possessing, I mean, that gift, perhaps best 
seen with the French, of making vivid one's sense 
of one's relation to other men and women in the 
social organism. It is the triumph of this kind 
of essay to be at once individualistic and social; 
without eccentricity, on the one hand, or vulgarity, 
on the other. Vulgarity, by the way, is a quality 
impossible to the heaven-called essayist ; it can be 



THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 95 

better tolerated in poetry even. For the intimacy 
between the essayist and his reader (I say reader 
rather than audience with a feeling that the re- 
lation is a sort of solitude a deux) is greater than 
in the case of any other form of literary expres- 
sion ; hence, when one enters, as it were, the inner 
rooms of a friend's house, any hint of the borne 
is the more quickly detected, the more surely in- 
sufferable. 

The voice of a natural essayist like Thoreau is 
somewhat muffled by being forced now and then 
into the public pulpit manner. Yet an essay- 
writer by instinct he certainly is; particularly in 
his journal, but often in the more formal 
chroniclings of his unique contact with nature. 
In Emerson, too, we encounter a writer with a vo- 
cation for the essay, but having other fish to fry, — 
doubtless a loftier aim but a different. No man, 
English or American, has a literary manner which 
makes the essay an inspired chat more than the 
Concord sage-singer ; and the inspired chat comes 
close to being the beau ideal of your true-blue 
essayist. With less strenuousness of purpose and 
just a bit more of human frailty — or at least 
sympathy with the frail, — here were indeed a 
prince in this kind ! 

How much of the allurement of the essay style 
did Lowell keep, however scholarlike his quest, 
in papers literary, historical, even philological ! 
In a veritable essay-subject like "On a Certain 
Condescension in Foreigners," he displays himself 



96 FORCES IN FICTION 

as of the right line of descent from Montaigne; 
there is in him then all that unforced, winsome, 
intimate, yet ever restrained revelation of self 
which is the essayist's model, and despair. In the 
love letters of the Brownings may be found some 
strictures by both Eobert and Elizabeth upon an 
early book of this great American's which must 
pain the admirer of the Brownings as well as of 
Lowell. It displays a curious insensitiveness to 
just this power of the Cambridge man which 
made him of so much more value to the world 
than if he had been scholar and nothing more. 
One can hardly rise from anything like a complete 
examination of Lowell's prose without the regret 
that his fate did not lead him to cultivate more 
assiduously and single-eyed, this rare and precious 
gift for essay — a gift shared with very few fellow 
Americans. 

A glance among later Victorian prose writers 
must convince the thoughtful that the essay in 
our special sense is gradually written less ; that as 
information comes in at the door, the happy giv- 
ing-forth of personality flies out at the window. 
It is in shy men like Alexander Smith or Eichard 
Jefferies that we come on what we are looking 
for, in such as they, rather than the more noisily 
famed. Plenty of charming prosists in these lat- 
ter days have been deflected by utility or emolu- 
ment away from the essay; into criticism, like 
Lang and Gosse and Dobson and Pater; into 
preaching and play-making, like Bernard Shaw; 



THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 97 

into journalism like Barry Pain and Quiller- 
Couch; into a sort of forced union of poetry and 
fiction, as with Kichard LeGallienne. All of these, 
too, and others still have been touched by fiction 
for better or worse. 

The younger Americans with potential essay 
ability are also for the most part swallowed up in 
more practical, "useful" ways of composition. Her 
old-fashioned devotion to the elder idea of the 
essay makes a writer like Miss Eepplier stand out 
with a good deal of distinction, so few of her 
generation are willing or able to do likewise. 
There is no magazine in America to-day, with the 
honorable exception of "The Atlantic/' which de- 
sires from contributors essays that look back to 
the finer tradition. Mr. Howells has reached a 
position of such authority in American letters 
that what he produces in the essay manner is wel- 
come — not because it is essay, but because it is he. 
His undeniable gift for the form is therefore all 
the better; often he strikes a gait happily remind- 
ful of what the essay in its traditions really is; 
the delightfully frank egoism of his manner 
covering genuine simplicity and modesty of na- 
ture. Since "Venetian Days" he has never ceased 
to be an essayist. 

The twin dangers with the younger essayists 
of both the Unite*d States and England are di- 
dacticism and preciosity. The former I believe 
most prevalent in this country ; and it is of course 
the death blow of the true essay. The danger of 






98 FORCES IN FICTION 

being too precious may be overcome with years: 
Max Beerbohm, for example, began by thinking 
and talking of himself, not for the reader's sake, 
but for self-love's sake. But of late he seems 
better to comprehend the essayist's proper sub- 
jectivity. We should not despair of essayists : no 
type of writer is rarer; the planets must conspire 
to make him ; he must not be overwhelmed by life 
and drawn into other modes of expression. 

Our generation has been lucky to possess one 
English essayist who has maintained and handed 
on the great tradition. I mean Stevenson. Al- 
though, in view of the extent and vogue of his 
novels and tales, Stevenson's essay work may seem 
almost an aside, it really is most significant. He 
is in the line of Charles Lamb. Where a man 
like Pater writes with elegance and suggestion 
after the manner of the suave and thoroughly 
equipped critic, Stevenson does a vastly higher 
thing; he talks ruddily, with infinite grace, 
humor, pathos and happiness, about the largest 
of all themes, — human nature. From "Ordered 
South" to "Pulvis et Umbra," through many a gay 
mood of smile and sunshine to the very deeps of 
life's weltering sea, Stevenson runs the gamut of 
fancy and emotion, the fantasticality of his themes 
being in itself the sign manual of a true essayist. 
In the Letters no man using English speech has 
chatted more unreservedly, and with more es- 
sential charm; it is the undress of literature that 
always instinctively stops this side of etiquette, 






THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 99 

of decency. The Stevenson epistles drive us on a 
still-hunt outside of the mother-tongue for their 
equal, with little prospect of quarry save within 
French borders. 

The essay is thus a literary creature to the mak- 
ing of which go mood and form — and the former 
would seem by far the paramount thing. Great 
and special gifts does it demand. ? Tis an Ariel 
among literary kinds, shy, airy, tricksy, elusive, 
vanishing in the garish light that beats down upon 
the arena where the big prizes of fiction are com- 
peted for amidst noise, confusion and eclat. But 
ever in its own slight, winsome way does it compel 
attention and gain hearts for its very own. 'Tis 
an aristocrat of letters; nowhere is it so hard to 
hide obvious antecedents, Many try, but few 
triumph in it. Therefore, when a real essayist 
arrives, let him be received with due acclaim and 
thanks special, since through him is handed on 
so ancient and honorable a form. 



LefC. 






THE MODEEN NEED FOE LITEEATUEE * 

In the childhood of nations the need for litera- 
ture was the need for knowledge. Long before 
literature received its name or was associated with 
the printed page, imaginative utterance in epic, 
lyric, play or Saga had its utilitarian value, be- 
cause through such forms history was handed 
down and popular wisdom embalmed. The 
minstrel chanted of battle almost before the 
warriors were breathed, their sinews relaxed; un- 
written law, which is traditional custom, was 
framed in gnomic rhymes for the better remem- 
bering of the people; early ballads spread the 
amatory news of the countryside ; later broadsides 
bruited the burning topics of the day in towns. 

Even the Philistine could appreciate literature 
which conserved these practical aims. Few men 
deny the necessity of information: if so-called 
poetry can convey it, they are willing to tolerate 
colorful speech and the lure of rhythmic move- 
ment, however insensitive they may be to such 
charm. Moreover, it is only fair to the way-faring 
man, now or in the dawn of time, to represent 
him as not quite indifferent to picture-making 
and music in language. Humanity in mass en- 



* An address for the Commencement Exercises at the 
Rush Medical College in Chicago, June 21st. 1901 
100 



MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 101 

joys a figure (though not recognizing and naming 
it after the manner of the rhetorics) ; and stands at 
gaze before a singer, even if the accompaniment 
be on a barrel-organ. It may well be believed that 
in the elder days when literature was thus a 
vehicle for the preservation and transmission of 
knowledge, many folk liked literature for its own 
sake. But letters (as we now call them) certainly 
had a solider standing on change aforetime be- 
cause of this practical use, this close kinship with 
information. 

With the development of society, however, has 
come a change. As civilization became articulate 
and complex, literature slowly, surely differenti- 
ated itself from the practical and utilitarian ; and 
knowledge — science, to give it a familiar and 
restrictive name — stood forth clearly over against 
the imaginative expression of life, ' whether in 
art or letters. And when this happened, the 
Philistine no longer needed literature, nor liked 
it. He had an instinctive feeling that it was sham, 
make-believe, a lying about life or a prettifying 
of life for the amusement of the idle rich. This 
view is of course of the Boeotian variety of 
thought; yet common enough of old, nor alto- 
gether departed this world even now. But as men 
waxed in civilization, in culture, they came gradu- 
ally to see that literature in any worthy sense was 
something higher; that it could even be of better 
use than for the transmission of information or 
the killing of time; that it embraced within its 



\ 



102 FORCES IN FICTION 

spacious domain all such records and accounts of 
human beings and their actions as should give us 
a sense of the power, beauty, grandeur and terror 
of life so that its true significance might be 
grasped. Literature in the enlightened modern 
view is an interpretation of life both as fact and 
as symbol ; not only in terms of number and space 
and time-sequence, but in terms of heart and soul 
as well — in terms of living. 

If this be true, we need not hold back from de- 
claring that literature is one of the world's great 
mouthpieces for the expression of ideals. To say 
this is not to ignore the pleasure-giving province 
of letters; the pleasure being, nevertheless, a 
means to an end rather than the end itself; just 
as Emerson shows how love between the young 
man and maiden, that divine prologue to the 
human drama which seems the play itself, is in 
reality but a step to lead those dear young 
creatures on to a final comprehension of the 
spiritual love in the universe — or, as the theo- 
logian would put it, to a knowledge of God. 
There is nothing, I say, in this conception of liter- 
ature hostile to the idea of amusement, pleasure, 
that inheres in it. Indeed that is literature's way 
of doing good; and the degree of joy that is got 
out of a book is a measure of its fruitfulness for 
us. Too often the province of instruction and 
the province of pleasure in literature are con- 
trasted as if they were antithetical, which is the 
veriest nonsense. Instruction in the noblest sense 



MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 103 

can come only where there is antecedent pleasure. 
Witness the school-child beginning to stir within 
and to grow, simply because he or she suddenly, 
unexpectedly, finds a lesson interesting — because 
it seems in some way related to life as the boy 
or girl knows life ; or as it has been warmed by the 
magnetism of a real teacher — not a text-book with 
arms and legs. 

Literature and religion, along with the arts, 
are the chief sources for the supplying of ideals. 
And whereas religion has an immense advantage in 
authority and gravity of aim, it is hardly too much 
to say for literature that in its secularity as well 
as in its plastic power to embrace the human case 
in all conceivable varieties, there lies a certain 
leverage ; while in the fact that literature teaches 
not didactically but by the winsome indirection 
of art, there is an obvious added strength, — the 
soul of mankind being caught unawares, as it 
were, through sensitiveness to beauty, by the 
spirit of good which is in literature — and in life. 
Matthew Arnold, you will remember, went so far 
as to assert his belief that all that should be re- 
tained of the religion of the future would be its 
essential poetry, the husks of form, the shards of 
dogma, being dropped behind. In other words, he 
thought that literature would swallow up religion. 
Without acting upon so radical a prophecy, surely 
we may feel that great literature in its enlighten- 
ment and uplift is always a handmaid of true re- 
ligion, trying to do much the same for man in a 



104 FORCES IN FICTION 

somewhat different way; approaching the one 
Temple by another avenue, the avenue of Beauty 
instead of by the avenue of the Good, both meet- 
ing in the avenue of the True, which runs straight 
on and into the Holy of Holies — for the Temple 
is one. 

Every age, then, needs its ideals, since they are 
magnets pointing the polar paths of conduct, of 
righteousness ; touchstones of character ; lamps to 
the feet of those who would walk upon the moun- 
tains. And literature, denned with any adequacy, 
can do a vast deal to create and hand on these 
ideals. In this sense, mankind's need for litera- 
ture is permanent. 

Perhaps some one thinks I do not allow suffi- 
ciently for the lower grades of what is called 
literature. We cannot always be on the heights. 
Moreover, 

"Not always the air that is rarest 

Is fairest, 
And we long in the valley to follow 
Apollo," 

complains the poet. There is neutral ground 
where books furnish us pleasure or pastime but 
fail of the great things here claimed for them. 
Granted. There are foot-hills and intermediate 
slopes as well as shining peaks; in fact, the 
humbler altitudes are the condition of having 
mountains at all. Yet, when we say mountains, 
we mean, rightly enough, the aerial summits, 
the aeries of eagles, topped by virginal snows, 



MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 105 

seeming inaccessible to common mortals. And 
likewise, when we speak of literature and would 
discover its true physiognomy, we very properly 
emphasize the lofty creations which are to be seen 
from afar and lift themselves nearest to God. 

But our day, it seems to me, has a special need 
for the inspiration from literature — from great 
essay, fiction, drama and poetry — and for particu- 
lar reasons. Ours is a complex and cosmopolitan 
time ; hence, literature can do not one but a num- 
ber of services for it, corresponding to the 
symptomatic phases of the age. The present era 
is called carelessly this or that: material, on the 
hunt for Yankee inventions; commercial, on the 
hunt for the dollar; scientific, on the hunt for 
the fact; spiritual, on the hunt for psychic 
phenomena and for strange new gods; agnostic, 
rejoicing in the cry, "There is no God and August 
Compte is His Prophet;" decadent, out-heroding 
Herod in obscene rites; humanitarian, seeking to 
play the part of the good Samaritan as never be- 
fore. The truth is we are none of these exclu- 
sively, but all of them, and more too. It takes a 
wide vision to cover such a time as this; it is a 
narrow, anemic view which interprets the 
Zeitgeist as if it were a one-theory movement. Let 
us have a look at a few of these streams of 
tendency, to see how they offer literature her op- 
portunity. 

We are scientific, I say. We study objective 
phenomena as they have never been studied before. 



106 FORCES IN FICTION 

How august the revealments of the nineteenth 
century in this vast field of research ! To read a 
book like Wallace's "The Wonderful Century/' or 
John Fiske's "A Century of Science" is as stimu- 
lating to the imagination as an Arabian Xights 
Entertainment. You, gentlemen of the graduating 
class, find it your privilege to enter on this noble 
quest of facts which shall effect the alleviation of 
suffering mankind and bring earth nearer to 
heaven, — yea, which in the far reaches of time 
may, it would almost seem to the quickened fancy, 
solve the riddle of immortality by the prolonga- 
tion of human life, approximating ever to the 
limitless life of the Better Land. You are the 
prophets of Euthanasia, the bringers-in of hope. 
But this privilege of yours, this tireless hunt for 
cause and effect within the sphere of the psycho- 
physical, is also your penalty, or may be. From 
very devotion to the fact, the spirit may be neg- 
lected ; and a sort of atrophy of the nature result 
towards the things of the heart and imagination. 
This is not inevitable, of course; but it is a pos- 
sible danger, especially to the scientist, pure and 
simple, who lacks the magnificent corrective which 
the good physician has in his daily practical 
ministrations to woful men and women. You re- 
member Darwin's testimony: how, loving Shaks- 
pere and the major poets and fictionists, but 
obliged to turn his back upon literature for years 
because of stress of work, he found, to his 
astonishment, upon returning to those once- 



MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 107 

cherished friends, that a distaste for them had 
grown up in him — a remarkable example of the 
shrinking of a faculty through disuse. The 
scientific man, as perhaps no other, needs litera- 
ture; not only as a legitimate amusement, a form 
of recreation — and we forget at times when we 
despitefully regard recreation that it means re- 
creation — but also as an exercise of the soul, a 
stimulator of the emotive, intuitional, affectional 
and aspirational fibres of a person. 

The patronizing, half-contemptuous attitude of 
the so-called practical person towards literature is 
sometimes a little hard to bear. A novel is to him 
something to let down on after dinner, along with 
the post-prandial cigar, turning away from real 
and important matters. People drop into poetry, 
as did Silas Wegg of blessed memory — 'tis a weak- 
ness at the best. The drama affords horse-play, 
slang, the ballet and dubious situations, to jaded 
nerves and drooping spirits. There is in a 
single-eyed devotion to objective fact, to the 
realities of the senses, at least a possibility that an 
absurd under-valuation of literature may follow; 
its true dignity and significance being utterly lost 
sight of in such a topsy-turvy notion of the re- 
lations of things in life that the first may be last 
and soul be as nothing to flesh. Literature in the 
high sense is a wholesome antidote for that par- 
ticular form of Philistinism which harps tire- 
somely upon what is known as the practical, — 
utility and the like, meaning that which can be 



108 FORCES IN FICTION 

felt, touched, tasted and seen. To the philosopher, 
all is practical which advances the race, and that 
most practical which most helps the highest in 
man ; and all is useful which best considers man's 
highest uses. This wretchedly limited, purblind, 
market-place conception of life cannot be held by 
one who enters sympathetically into the privileges 
of literature. And, when fact in this special and 
narrow sense is emphasized (as it is in our new 
century), it is a blessed thing that a door still 
stands invitingly open upon a garden of de- 
lights, upon the pleasances of the imagination, 
fairer, richer than ever before, so notable have 
been the additions to the garden-growths during 
the past one hundred years — that wonderful 
nineteenth century literature, fruit of so many 
lands and kinds. 

Again, ours is a day when the dollar is believed 
to be mighty, if not almighty ! the multi-million- 
aire is a type of manhood emblazoned in news- 
paper and magazine, all but worshiped at the 
family altar. By no means is the American unique 
here; but viewing modern life broadly, is it not 
true that there is an increasing tendency to grade 
people by their bank-account, to give a new mean- 
ing to the word idolatry? Now, literature, when 
true to its mission, reflects and interprets life 
(its raw material) in such wise that no such dis- 
proportionate estimate of money is possible; 
simply because in a broad, sane outlook on life, 
money is shown to be but a means to an end, — 



MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 109 

and that end the realization in each and all of us 
of our potentialities, so that a happier, richer and 
higher life shall ensue and society at large he 
permanently benefited. The voice of all literature 
is consentient in thus acclaiming the real mean- 
ing of life; to wit, character-formation, growth 
towards the ideal for ourselves and others. Its 
teaching is all that way, — just as truly when it 
exhibits vice, degradation and despair as when 
sailing majestically upon the winds of heaven 
high above human frailty. For in sounding the 
dissonance, literature makes us to yearn for the 
celestial harmonies; we would not recognize the 
discordant as such, in sooth, were it not for our 
instinct for the great concords beneath the sur- 
face jars. Literature is all the while telling us 
of life so that we read plain its obscure scroll, 
understand its true values, and so are safeguarded 
from the terribly shriveling idea of existence pos- 
sible to the mere money grabber. After all, there 
is something in the world, as Stevenson has it, 
besides "mud and old iron, cheap desires and 
cheap fears." George Eliot draws a Silas Marner, 
and we see that hideous thing a miser weaned from 
gold coin by the softer, tenderer gold of a lovely 
little maiden's hair. Moliere paints a Harpagon, 
and we shudder away from the possibility of that 
same soulless passion. Dickens puts before us in 
full length the elder Dombey that we may behold 
the final melting of that man of marble to whom 
business was a God, he being led by the potent 



110 FORCES IN FICTION 

hand of his girl-child back to the real life he had 
so forgotten — the life of the simple affections and 
of household hearts. And Balzac's Grandet bites 
into our memory forever the awful consequences 
of that insatiable money-lust, with its demoniac 
power of warping man's nobler nature. Literature 
of the first order is always doing just this, I re- 
peat ; passing a healing hand across the eyes sealed 
by worldliness and making them to see, not 
through a glass darkly, but face to face. The need 
for literature is doubled whenever and wherever 
men and women are in bondage to these eidola of 
the world, the flesh and the devil. 

But we are practical in the United States and 
need literature, again, because we incline to laud 
use rather than beaut}- — as if beauty were aught 
but a higher usefulness. YTe are a practical folk, 
it is said — which is on the whole a misleading 
generalization. Still, it is not to be denied that 
we are only of late beginning to turn from a 
strenuous attention to material and immediate in- 
terests, giving heed to higher interests. The 
Prince of Peace and Prosperity is the proper per- 
son to arouse the Sleeping Beauty from her slum- 
ber. There is here no matter for reproach: our 
problems during the century of the Eepublic have 
been practical; problems of Government, Na- 
tional, State and Municipal; problems economic 
and political. Arts and letters must of necessity 
wait on such work; the wonder is (in view of the 
situation) that Americans can point to such 



MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 111 

writers as distinguish and adorn the century just 
closed. 

Our literary art, our architecture, public and 
private, our endeavors in music and painting, 
have all testified in the past to this necessary de- 
votion to practical pursuits and services. But 
worthy accomplishment in these high activities is 
now common. The Exposition year of 1893 was a 
signal that we had in many ways stepped from 
our leading strings ; and more and more with the 
growth of a leisured class shall we realize that 
immunity from wage-earning does not inevitably 
mean dissipation nor exclusive devotion to sports 
and society. While, with the establishment of a 
firm material basis for the cultivation of the 
higher faculties, literature, along with the other 
arts, should make its appeal to a constantly grow- 
ing audience. And I believe it is doing so, the 
popular magazine, unjustly sneered at by some, 
being a sort of middle member in a chain which 
begins with the newspaper and ends with standard 
literature. If, along with steadily waxing ma- 
terial prosperity, there come not a corresponding 
response to such an art and revealer of life as 
literature, sorry will be our case indeed. That way 
decadence lies. A cultivation of the sense of 
beauty and the sense of righteousness (which are 
not twain, but one, the holiness of beauty, in 
Lanier's phrase, being as precious as the beauty of 
holiness) must go with general prosperity; other- 



112 FORCES IN FICTION 

wise, that land is doomed. All history is a sole 
trumpet-voice announcing these tidings. 

The commonest mistake about literature is the 
notion that it is merely an ornament to life. The 
reason that a nation in the more practical period 
of its development has less to do with the arts is 
hot because the time for luxury has not come ; but 
because it is in a lower stage of evolution, and 
not altogether ready for the finer things, for a 
philosophic conception of the universe. Our best 
American literature, that made by the prophet 
sages and singers of Xew England, was produced 
under conditions giving the lie direct to the idea 
that only an environment of luxury begets 
creative works. The high thinking of an Emer- 
son comes out of plain living. 

But again, we need literature to idealize the 
conventional, the commonplace and the homely in 
life. I do not mean by idealize to falsify or senti- 
mentalize; but to show the idea inhering in the 
gross and seemingly meaningless mass, to detach 
the symbol from the fact, so that the fact takes 
on significance and loveliness. Eealism of the 
right sort should serve as a sort of gloss on the 
poet's text, 

"Flesh is as nothing to Spirit, 
And the essence of life is divine." 

It should make apparent that as there is nothing 
harder so there is nothing higher than the daily 
doing of little duties; as Wordsworth calls them, 

"The little nameless unremembered acts 
Of kindness and of love." 



MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 113 

It should show that war, which often seems but 
a huddle of carnage, a blaze of savage passions, Is 
at least linked with the love of country, with the 
thought that "sweet and glorious it is to die for 
one's land ;" that religion is something more than 
an observance of forms, being the merging of all 
lesser loves in the love of the Eternal Maker and 
Father; that even machinery has poetry in it, as 
Kipling's McAndrews has demonstrated. It is 
thus that literature should make a glory out of 
the grey substance of our days. This handling 
of the homely so that it is seen to have a touch of 
the heavenly, is the mission of your true realist. 
The great makers of literature are always in this 
sense realists as much as idealists. It is the way 
of Homer, of Dante, of Shakspere, of Cervantes; 
of Moliere, Goethe, Tolstoy, Meredith and Steven- 
son. Let me give an example from Master Wil- 
liam Shakspere — master alike of human speech 
and human life; that inimitable scene in "Henry 
V," where from the mouths of his boon compan- 
ions, Dame Quickly, Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph, 
we learn of the passing of Falstaff . 

Sir John's death being announced by Ancient 
Pistol, says Bardolph, eyes ashine for the nonce 
as well as nose: 

"Would I were with him, wheresoever he is, 
either in heaven or hell." What a world of good 
fellowship in that line! And then mine hostess 
goes on, with exquisite pathos, all unconscious 
and homely as it is : 



114 FORCES IX FICTIOX 

"Xay, sure, he's not in hell; he's in Arthur's 
bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom." She 
meant Abraham's bosom — but we are glad of the 
slip, for emotion is always making slips of that 
kind. "A' made a finer end and went away as 
it had been any Christom child; a' parted even 
just between twelve and one, even at the turning 
o' the tide." You remember that Barkis, too, went 
out with the tide in another great homely -life 
scene: "For after I saw him fumble with the 
sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his 
fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way," (you 
can hear the good dame snuffle by this time as she 
continues) "for his nose was as sharp as a pen 
and a' babbled of green fields." That sorry old 
worldling, Falstaff, that fellow of sack and women, 
thievery and braggadocio, being Christian reared, 
does when he comes to the mind-wandering 
which preludes death, revert to that most idyllic- 
ally beautiful of psalms and is led beside still 
waters, yea, lies down in green pastures, as if he 
were a care-free boy again untouched of sin. Per- 
haps even he can say, "I will fear no evil, for thou 
art with me." But hear Dame Quickly again: 

''How now, Sir John! quoth I; what man, be 
o' good cheer. So a' cried out, God, God, God! 
three or four times. Xow I, to comfort him, bid 
him a' should not think of God ; I hoped there was 
no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts 
yet. So a' bade me lay more clothes on his feet; 
I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and 



MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 115 

they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to the 
knees, and they were as cold as any stone; and so 
upward and upward, and all was as cold as any 
stone." 

How circumstantial it all is, like a doctor's re- 
port for detail and accuracy ; but how it is illumi- 
nated with a splendidly fraternal tolerancy to- 
wards all seamy humanity, living and dead. Of 
a sudden we realize that even the great confra- 
ternity of rogues — epitomized in this master-rogue 
of all literature — is united to us in a common 
bond of brotherhood; and that is a lesson worth 
while. Behold, I say again, the true and only 
realism. Is it too much to claim for literature 
that she has no mean mission in thus revealing a 
spirit of good in things counted evil, in suggest- 
ing that nothing is common and unclean past re- 
demption ? Such at least is the divine unwisdom 
of the pure in heart. 

And now a message of literature for our time 
which I would especially bear down on is its power 
to help the agnostic mood. Never before, I must 
think, has a more gracious or a grander oppor- 
tunity offered itself to literature than in this re- 
gard. Our generation has experienced a tremen- 
dous readjustment of ethical ideas, a veritable 
seismic upheaval, of which the tremors and rum- 
blings have scarcely died away. The agnostic 
state of mind has been the natural outcome of all 
this change — which in the end will be seen to 
stand for gain more than loss. Now the essence 



116 FORCES IN FICTION 

of great literature, like that of true religion, is of 
a potency to furnish the doubting Thomases with 
sweetness and light; with hope, inspiration and a 
golden comfort: and it can do this with all the 
winning gentleness of love and with that strength 
of purity which is as the strength of ten. Agnosti- 
cism is a brain state ; literature appeals primarily 
to the heart and is the antidote needed, offering 
its warm-blooded, wholesome, imperative yea to 
the cold analytic nay of the intellect. A very im- 
portant function of literature in respect of modern 
life lies here. 

You are very well aware, however, that much 
of current literature, so far from counteracting 
this tendency to doubt and despair, abets it, and, 
in fact, issues out of it. This is to be expected, 
for literature (when honest) should always faith- 
fully reflect the spirit of the Time; it is its duty 
its privilege. Nor must we deny the benefit of 
literature which not only mirrors the compara- 
tively smooth surface waters of society but also 
drops a plummet line into its murky abysmal 
depths. The knife of the surgeon seeking to ex- 
tirpate the root trouble is kindly meant and wel- 
come. 

Particularly is the literature which reveals the 
predicaments of the weak, the wretched, the out- 
cast of the earth, a serviceable addition to the 
library table. There is a need of books that 
awaken our sympathies for the under dog in the 
social struggle, and make us to understand his 



MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 117 

situation. The under dog will be dustier and per- 
haps bloodier than his conqueror and so is likely 
to be less pleasant to look upon ; but it were a sad 
mistake not to pay attention to him. Never has 
there been so much fiction and drama and poetry 
that has expressed the 

"Still sad music of humanity," 

and one deadens one's sensibilities and makes shal- 
low one's nature in turning away from such books 
simply because they are not agreeable. This spirit 
extends even to animals. Nevertheless, I think we 
can say, and say with emphasis, that in considera- 
tion of the liberal doses of pessimism furnished 
for the past decade in the literature of civilized 
lands, in view of the fact (already adumbrated) 
that a more cheerful view of the world is becoming 
popular, and with the additional consideration 
that helpfulness and good cheer are prime merits 
always in literary creations, we can say, I repeat, 
that the paramount need just now is for books 
that incite to courageous action, to high heart 
and hope, to such a broad re-statement of the ever- 
lasting beautiful as shall make for happy living, 
for vigorous deeds, for an outdoor optimism. 

Of desiccated analytics, of dark psychic tortuosi- 
ties, of eloquent variations on the overworked 
theme, vanitas vanitatum, we have had enough 
and to spare. The gospel for an age of doubt (to 
borrow Dr. Van D} T ke's name for it) should be of 
gladder tidings. Modern literature must be thera- 
peutic; it must carry healing in its wings. It 



118 FORCES IN FICTION 

must not be a literature for and by mattoids. Nor 
is this to slight the work of writers like Tolstoy, 
Zola, Hardy, and Ibsen; we need them, too — and 
have had them. But in the light of the tendency 
for the past twenty years, and looking to the fu- 
ture, we need the literature of encouragement 
more. How are we going to get it ? It lies with 
the thoughtful reading public; it can be effected 
if that body of folk will show plainly in what they 
buy, what sort of literature they prefer. The test 
of sales is obvious and irresistible in its results. 
If the great majority of those who support litera- 
ture wish for the literature of encouragement 
rather than for the literature of despair, and will 
leave the one and cleave unto the other, the bat- 
tle is won. It is a pity we cannot consciously 
combine on this. Ours is an age of Trusts. I 
should like to, see a Trust of the Amalgamated 
Interests of Consumers of the Literature of Ozone 
and Sunlight, Unlimited. The title is rather cum- 
bersome ; but what a power-house that plant could 
command. 

In a word, and finally, literature is always 
needed to be a spokesman of those deep-lying, 
ever abiding instincts and affirmations of the soul 
of man which dominate his life and shape his end. 
And literature is of particular use to-day just in 
proportion as we forget that life is more in the 
spirit than in the flesh; that in order to any full 
living, we must feed not the body only but the 
mind and soul as well. 



PAST AND PRESENT IN LITERATURE 

The Bishop of London is credited with advising 
some young women students to read three books 
written before the year 1800 for every one written 
later. He declared that, in accordance with a vow, 
he had followed this plan for ten years and that 
those years had been the happiest of his life. 

I hope his lordship said nothing of the sort; 
if he did, one is inclined to feel the more sympa- 
thetic toward Sydney Smith's remark — that fam- 
ous wit had in mind the exceeding difficulty of 
turning the classic of a literature into the tongue 
of another — that everything suffers by translation 
— except a bishop. 

For the imputed statement is foolish and mis- 
leading. It is an example of an often recurrent 
attitude toward the past and the present, the dei- 
fication of the one and the depreciation of the 
other, so that great injustice is done to modern 
things. Deep in the human heart is implanted 
the yearning back toward a Golden Age, forward, 
to the Millennium ; and the poor tarnished present 
pays the penalty of its humdrum nearness, its 
unideal reality. It would be much closer to the 
truth to say that three books to one in favor of 
the nineteenth century were advisable, especially 

119 



120 FORCES IN FICTION 

if the literature of the English-speaking race be 
in mind; and the bishop's words, as reported, 
would seem to have meant that. Think for a 
moment what such a dictum implies ! It belittles, 
or at least throws out of proportion, the poetry 
of Keats, Shelley and Byron, of Wordsworth and 
Coleridge, of Browning, Tennyson and Swinburne, 
of Poe, Whitman and Kipling, the romances and 
novels of Scott, Hawthorne and Stevenson, of 
Eliot, Dickens and Thackeray, of later men and 
women like Meredith, Hardy, Ward and Barrie; 
it slights the essay work of Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, 
De Quincey and Irving, of Carlyle and Buskin, of 
Emerson and Lowell. These and many others 
scarcely less worthy are set aside, by implication, 
as if in writing later than that arbitrary mark of 
1800 they had committed the unpardonable sin. 
I am running over, be it observed, but a few stel- 
lar names, and am confined to authors using our 
own tongue. If continental literature were to be 
included, the bishop's offense becomes more hein- 
ous, for one's head fairly buzzes with the great 
creative writers whose labor has since been done. 
In short, taking the range, variety and quality 
of performance and the number of representatives 
into the consideration, the simple fact is that no 
century in the whole evolution of our magnificent 
English literature is so rich and worthy of laud 
as the one just closed, not even Shakspere's, on 
the principle that one swallow does not make a 
summer. It is the part of common-sense, justice 



PAST AND PRESENT IN LITERATURE 121 

and patriotism to say this ; the danger in twisting 
the truth into an undue exaltation of the by-gone 
— fine as that may be — is the neglect of the pres- 
ent-day literature by those who are likely to be led 
by what to them seems a final judgment, to wit, 
the opinion of a bishop. 

There is a special reason why the present in 
literature should be appreciated at its full worth. 
The very fact that it is the present, not the past, 
is in its favor. Even if nineteenth century litera- 
ture were distinctly inferior to the eighteenth, in- 
stead of being triumphantly greater, it would be 
ill-advised to undervalue the former ; nay, it would 
still have an interest for us beyond that of any 
other time. And this, simply because it represents 
our day. Literature always reflects life, and the 
best literature of a given age is a mirror in which 
we may see move the body of the age, and, listen- 
ing, catch the sound of its heart-beats. Its lan- 
guage is our own; it expresses our ideals, indus- 
trial, social, political, philosophical, spiritual; it 
involves a hundred questions pertinent to our own 
period and to no other, perhaps not yet born in 
1800. This side of literature is, to be sure, in 
large measure its practical and intellectual side, 
its contribution to knowledge, having less to do 
with the aesthetic denotements of charm and 
beauty. But these aesthetic conceptions themselves 
also change. The ideal of beauty is by no means 
eternal. A representative piece of literature dur- 
ing the past fifty years, or thirty years, is a sure 



122 FORCES IN FICTION 

registration of this shift of both thought and feel- 
ing. 

To give an illustration : The rise and spread of 
the doctrine of evolution since 1850 is the cen- 
tury's mighty contribution to science; all litera- 
ture since 1850, beginning with such a master- 
piece as Tennyson's "In Memoriam," feels this 
change, reflects the revolution of thought that is 
involved. To read literature before 1800, to the 
neglect of that written in the second half of the 
century just closed, is to be hopelessly out of touch 
with all modern thinking, to show oneself an in- 
tellectual faineant. This is an illustration having 
in mind literature as intellectual pabulum, as 
mind-stuff. But take literature as art, too : Since 
realism so-called became the dominant creed, 
beauty, the aim of all art, has come to be regarded 
as something different from the older conception; 
not as the antithesis to truth, not a prettification 
of fact or a falsification thereof, but a more forci- 
ble presentation of truth itself. Hence, in the 
books that do not flinch in setting down the dark 
and terrible in human life, we recognize a kind 
of beauty — "the still, sad music of humanity." 
Thus the notion of art itself has widened, I say; 
our idea of the province of the aesthetic has been 
stretched to admit more of life, of reality. And 
it is only in the literature of the last half-century 
that this fruitful lesson has been learned ; to turn 
away from its lesson is mentally to stunt one- 
self. 



PAST AND PRESENT IN LITERATURE 123 

It is our first business to know and believe in 
the present, upon the firm basis of a thorough 
culture in all the past has to offer. But the past 
should be studied for the sake of the present, not 
vice versa; nor, worse yet, by a grudging conces- 
sion made to the Now in the reading of one book 
to the prescribed three of an earlier time. I am 
convinced that the temper of mind personified in 
the Bishop of London comes of a false worship of 
outgrown gods. An old man fondly idealizes the 
days of his own youth, whereas, when they were 
being lived in, he grumbled over them right heart- 
ily. In the same way, some people grow all but 
maudlin over a past age which, were it the present, 
they would be the first to satirize. If (which God 
forbid!) we could reverse Time's dial and be set 
down in the past, to wrestle with all its enormi- 
ties, we should then find (if we doubted it before) 
that the world is moving forward, not backward, 
and that literature has responded to this general 
law. It is this wholesome truth which Mark 
Twain inculcates in his "A Connecticut Yankee 
in King Arthur's Court," as serious a book as was 
ever writ. 

Nor is this view to disparage the literary past; 
to deny that it is rich in writers who can teach 
and delight us — spirits who still rule us from their 
urns: Chaucer's charm of musical narrative and 
homely delineation; Spenser's linked sweetness, 
as he cries up chivalric deeds; Shakspere and his 
fellows and soon-followers, forming the golden 



124 FORCES IN FICTIOX 

time of letters: the seventeenth century with its 
great central figure of Dryden; the early eight- 
eenth, with Addison, Steele, and Swift; the mid- 
dle years, bringing that wonderful new birth, the 
novel, in the hands of Richardson, Fielding, and 
Smollett; the second half, with Johnson, Gold- 
smith, and the rest. Even to run thus over the 
names of a few mountain peaks, where the foot- 
hills and valleys hide humbler scenes which yet 
yield us everlasting joy, is to kindle the enthu- 
siasm of the sincere lover of English literature. 
To read and know and love those earlier authors 
is not only to add to our stock of permanent pleas- 
ure; it is to be instructed in the development of 
the English race, since in its literature a race is 
best, because most spontaneously, reflected. The 
finest literature of a period is always the truest 
exponent of that time, since it is by his ideals that 
we properly judge the aspiring creature called 
man. The high-water mark on the beach alone 
registers the tide; all lower wave impulses are 
obliterated. 

Then, too, there is — and rightly — an illusion 
of the past which lends a fascination to older 
literature, and many are drawn to it for that rea- 
son. This attraction is in response to what may 
be called the human instinct for romance: seen 
just now in the general turning to historical fic- 
tion. The quaintness. unwonted color, and heroic 
proportions assumed by what is remote in time 
help to produce this well-nigh thaumaturgic effect, 



PAST AND PRESENT IN LITERATURE 125 

an effect most enjoyable and, within proper limits, 
perfectly legitimate. 

But all possible concessions being made, it re- 
mains true that the disproportionate estimate of 
the literary past in contrast with the present — as 
exampled in the statement attributed, I hope er- 
roneously, to the Bishop of London — is a form of 
affectation or ignorance which should be met with 
candid hostility whencesoever it comes. The stu- 
dent should be reared to a reverential admiration 
for the literary riches of the last one hundred years, 
which it is his privilege to be born into ; the lover 
of books should, in the very light of his knowledge 
of the past, come to a fuller appreciation of the 
glories of a later day. And the critic should be 
constantly on guard against the insidious danger 
of an unbalanced admiration for some pet school 
or author or period, lest his sense of relative values 
■ — so essential to any real criticism — be lost and he 
fall into the habit of belittling the larger and over- 
praising that which is of less moment. Young 
folk, as a rule, have a natural and healthy interest 
in the present — including the literary present. 
They are pretty likely to read current books rather 
than those which are older. Therefore, it is prob- 
able that the Bishop's sort of suggestion, made to 
college students, would be comparatively innocu- 
ous. But those same young folk, when they come 
to maturity, might act in accordance with the ad- 
vice; might even take to heart Charles Lamb's 
whimsical saying, that whenever a new volume 



126 FORCES IN FICTION 

appeared he read an old one. And if the habit 
of regarding contemporaneous literature with sus- 
picion were thus formed, the result would be an 
unhappy one. A belief in the present, whether it 
be literature or life which makes literature pos- 
sible, is, when you come to think of it, a belief 
in the great laws and unfolding potentialities of 
the universe. Life greatens toward the light, and 
the nineteenth century is the heir of the ages. 
Let us rejoice in it. 



THE USE OF ENGLISH 

If the study of the English language in its uses 
and abuses seem dry and repellent, it is, I must 
think, the fault of the pedant who handles it. 
Few things are of more general interest to those 
who use English speech — and what a vast army 
they make — than the manipulation of the mother 
tongue in its manifold meanings. We all use En- 
glish whether we will or no; alas, how many of 
us misuse it ! To be sure, one may be born into 
English, grow up, love, pay taxes, and be buried 
in it, with the same unconsciousness of its privi- 
leges and demands as that displayed by M. Jour- 
dain with regard to the use of prose. Still, to all 
who enjoyed the advantages of some schooling, the 
right uses of this linguistic opportunity is not a 
matter of indifference. The great majority of 
English speakers and writers come to a conscious 
love of the language. It is a thing inwrought with 
their life and the life of others near and dear. No 
language is a dead thing, though the dry scientific 
analysis of scholars lead wrongly to that opinion. 
Eather, is each a mighty store-house of human 
treasures ; a musical instrument, listening to which 
one may hear an infinitude of melodies. Men 
have for centuries laughed and loved in it, sworn 
and been forsworn, hated and hoped, yea, lived 

127 



128 FORCES IN FICTION 

and died. No wonder if it be a symphonic crea- 
ture, full of crashing harmonies, of the caresses 
of poetry, of tumultuous discords, and of divine 
songs of peace. 

If this be true of any tongue, it is emphatically 
true of a dominant tongue like the English — 
native in so many lands, spoken under so many 
skies, so militant in its march, so plastic in its 
manifold adaptations to the needs of its children. 
It is a tongue made splendid by more than a thou- 
sand years of great literature. It is the home 
speech of more folk than those who make populous 
the shores of Kipling's seven seas. The history 
of words and of the sentences into which they 
fall, is no dry record of bloodless facts, but as 
dramatic as the history of mankind; indeed, it is 
the history of man as he has crystallized into a 
sound-symbol "the thoughts, imaginings, faiths 
and aspirations of his life, from the cave dwellers 
to the Darwin of his century. Words, like men, 
have their "strange, eventful histories," and, again 
like men, one word in its time "plays many parts." 
To follow the ups and downs of a single proper 
noun — a stupid name since its career is as often 
as not improper and hence doubly fascinating — or 
of a common noun — named with equal stupidity, 
since its story is likely to be most uncommon — this 
pursuit, I say, is often as exciting as a novel or a 
foot-ball game. Thus it follows that the diction- 
ary (rightly used and comprehended) is the most 
interesting of all books, save perhaps the Bible. 



THE USE OF ENGLISH 129 

Dr. Holmes knew this when he made the Auto- 
crat say: "When I feel inclined to read poetry 
I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words 
is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The 
author may arrange the gems effectively, but their 
shape and luster have been given by the attrition 
of ages. Bring me the finest simile from the 
whole range of imaginative writing, and I will 
show you a single word which conveys a more pro- 
found, a more accurate, and a more eloquent 
analogy." Emerson had the same feeling when he 
wrote : "It does not need that a poem should be 
long. Every word was once a poem." 

As a matter of personal testimony, I may say 
that I never open a dictionary without a conscious 
quiver of excitement at the likelihood of a sensa- 
tional experience. It is almost a miracle that such 
a study has had the power of converting living 
men (scholars, in the ordinary parlance) into dry- 
asdusts. One would suppose it might have an ef- 
fect analogous to that of earth-contact upon 
Antaeus. I dare say it is because they have studied 
the bones, not the flesh and blood of language, 
making themselves scientists instead of amateurs 
of life. For language, in reality, is a manifesta- 
tion of life, and always that. The dead languages, 
we say, meaning the people are dead who spoke 
them ; which is no fault of the tongue itself, which 
lives lustily on in its literature. 

It will do no harm, now, to illustrate the state- 
ment as to the essential poetry, pathos and drama 



130 FORCES IN FICTION 

inherent in these vital word-symbols. And first, 
a striking example of the rise and fall of the same 
word. The noun cwen in Old English had the 
generic significance of "woman," with no reference 
to station or moral status. In the course of time, 
and with a modified spelling, it appeared tricked 
out as our modern English queen, a sovereign of 
the people — the highest earthly lot attainable by 
the sex. And yet, in another dress of letters — 
for spelling has played a part in the drama of 
words like to that played by clothes among human- 
ity — it paraded itself in Elizabethan times and 
still lives as quean, — a common drab, a painted 
woman of the town ! These two words from the 
selfsame ancestor, differentiated by a garb of let- 
ters, run the gamut of woman's social and moral 
possibilities. Surely nothing could be more im- 
pressive; a single noun, yet a whole sermon on 
sex! 

Think, t~oo, how personal names lend themselves 
to picturesque effects. Duns Scorus was in the 
thirteenth century a great scholar, the last of the 
great schoolmen ; but, like other great men before 
and since, he had enemies, who called him unpleas- 
ant epithets and jeered at his philosophy, until 
his nick-name Duns became with them a term of 
reproach and ridicule. And behold! we say 
"dunce" to-day to the stupid schoolboy who wears 
the conical cap in the corner. The wisest man of 
his time gives the tongue its stock designation for 
a fool! It were well for dunces to realize how 



THE USE OF ENGLISH 131 

honorable a pedigree they boast of. Let me illus- 
trate once more. Dickens in his "Tale of Two 
Cities" speaks of the "figure of that sharp female 
called La Guillotine." There is a popular notion 
abroad that Dr. Guillotin was the inventor of that 
terrible machine whose maw was fed with such dras- 
tic food during the red days of the Terror in France 
the unfortunate. But as a matter of fact, to one 
Dr. Louis belongs the dubious honor of the in- 
vention. Guillotin was a man of mercy who in 
the very year of the outbreak of the French Kevo- 
lution advocated the abolition of this grim method 
of capital punishment. And the people, forsooth, 
with tremendous irony, set his blameless name 
upon an instrument of extermination which bears 
in the minds of men a bad eminence, like Milton's 
Satan. The sardonic satire of history has few 
more striking examples. 

These instances of the weatherings of words 
typify a host more, and may serve to illuminate 
my thesis that all that man has thought and felt 
is registered in language, which therefore offers 
a study of widest scope and of thrilling interest. 

It seems an ironic comment upon the inutility 
of education that language, in proportion as it be- 
comes learned, grows colorless, abstract, formal, 
and unexciting. The speech of the philosopher is 
not only hard to be understood by the people, but 
seemingly stripped of all life and color, whereas the 
talk of the huckster on the street, the craftsman in 
the shop, or the sailor on the sea has a smack, an 



132 FORCES IN FICTION 

idiosyncrasy, that makes it relishable. Their 
words are at once concrete and imaginative. Yet, 
since all language roots in metaphor, the abstruse 
lingo of a Kant was once of imagination all com- 
pact. The palest word-medium of to-day is the 
metaphor of by-gone years ; the most brilliant pic- 
ture-coin of the present will become the outworn 
counter of the future. Language when handled 
by children is instructive, for a child in this re- 
gard stands for the youth of the race. We com- 
monly speak of the little folk as unconscious poets 
and for this very reason : they talk in tropes, their 
fancies are expressed in figures. As the analytic 
processes of maturity gain on the intuitive, crea- 
tive acts of speech, this imaginative element slow- 
ly disappears, until it is only the grown-up 
poet (who in this respect preserves his childlike- 
ness) that dares to use language in an unconven- 
tional way, — in which use he is joined, however, 
by the unlettered all about, whose conversation, 
being offhand and instinctive, and being, more- 
over, vitally related to their interests and occupa- 
tions, has the savor of real things and a certain 
fresh felicity. It is also instructive to see how, 
with all of us, our speech is happy when we are 
most at ease and hence most natural ; the drawing- 
room garb and the drawing-room idiom are alike 
drearily limited. The same people who in the 
street or at their business will be racy of speech, 
wax jejune and uninspiring under the social 
lamps. Evening dress seems to throttle idiom. 



THE USE OF ENGLISH 133 

This leads us to a plain fact as to the origin of 
language: it is the birth of instinct, of emotion, 
of imagination; not a reasoned-out process but a 
creative impulse; a blundering yet puissant effort 
of man's genius. Whatever our theory of the be- 
ginning of speech, this holds true. And it is a 
truth with a direct bearing upon all present-day 
questions of language-use — a veritable search- 
light in the fog. 

Granting, now, the attractions of this study, a 
remark must be made as to the certificate of au- 
thority in matters of language. Plain speaking 
is in place here. People discuss questions of 
speech-use with the same freedom with which they 
comment upon the weather ; this is the immemora- 
ble parade ground of cock-sure judgments. In- 
numerable little friendly battles are fought upon 
this or that moot-point and there is a general feel- 
ing that one man is as good as another in the con- 
test. This is all well enough for the innocuous 
tilts of society; but if the point at issue be taken 
seriously, it is well to remember that in this sub- 
ject, as in all others, the specialists must decide. 
No person of culture familiar with the present- 
day uses of English, but lacking knowledge of the 
tongue in its historical development, is in a posi- 
tion to lay down the law. This is why many popu- 
lar books upon words and their uses are often 
misleading and darken counsel. These authors 
may be intelligent, they may have considerable 
acquaintance with current linguistic habits; but 



134 FORGES IN FICTION 

they are not philologists; and it is the language- 
student and he alone who is wise in the premises. 
In other spheres of human knowledge this prin- 
ciple is acted upon; it must be held to firmly 
here. 

Many so-called vulgarisms may be explained if 
not excused by an appeal to the history of English 
words. The wayfaring man says "six year ago" 
and "six head of cattle/' omitting the plural sign ; 
the one expression would be called vulgar, the 
other vernacular, idiomatic. But both have his- 
torical ground ; they look back to a time when the 
plural significance was indicated not by the addi- 
tion of s, as in the modern speech, but by the 
genitive case, "six year" being in reality, in its 
older form "six of years" (Old English, six 
geara). And the instinct of idiom has preserved 
even to our own day this thousand-year-old fact. 
Again, in the analogous phrase "a six foot cable," 
we see exactly the same principle at work. It is 
more idiomatic still to give the old form. Imagine 
calling it a "six feet cable !" Yet even the keenly 
intelligent who discuss language on the basis of 
merely current usage will be forced for consis- 
tency's sake to favor that form of the phrase, al- 
though puzzled to find that, somehow, it quite 
lacks the right flavor. 

In the same way, a knowledge of word lineage 
sheds light upon pronunciation. An examination 
of English literature from earliest times down to 
the present, teaches the student that a general law 



THE USE OF ENGLISH 135 

of accent is at work in our language. It may be 
called the radical tendency of our tongue in this 
matter; the tendency to move the accent back to 
the root syllable. A tendency at variance to this 
is that of euphony, which in polysyllabic words 
demands such distribution of emphasis as shall 
satisfy the ear; and in all words requires some 
attention to musical values. But this is minor 
to the major law of the backward- working accent. 
Foreign words introduced into our tongue, are at 
first pronounced after their native laws : but just 
in proportion as they become anglicised, do they 
fall under this rule, their accent receding towards 
the root or (in case the root and first syllable do 
not agree) to the first syllable of the word. Thus, 
in Marlowe's play, "The Jew of Malta," occurs the 
line: 

And with extorting, cozening forfeiting, 

where the accent of the last word must, to the best 
results of music, fall upon the second syllable: 
while to-day it has reached the first syllable, for- 
feiting. The word being French, this earlier pro- 
nunciation is just what one would expect. Com- 
ing a hundred years nearer our own time, we find 
in Milton's "Paradise Lost" the line : 

Their planetary motions and aspects'. 

In this case, a Latin word is, in the seventeenth 
century, naturally, more conscious of its origin 



136 FORCES IN FICTION 

than is the case now, when, more thoroughly En- 
glish, it receives the native accent as'pects. 

Moving another hundred years toward the pres- 
ent time, in Thomas Grey's "Sketch of His Own 
Character" the opening lines run as follows : 

Too poor for a bribe and too proud to impor'tune, 
He had not the method for making a fortune. 

Here, obviously, the end of the first line is made 
to rhyme with fortune. The present pronuncia- 
tion of the word is, however, im'portune' ; that is 
to say, it has moved back to the first syllable, with 
a secondary accent on the third. Robert Brown- 
ing, with the older accentuation in mind, has ven- 
tured in one of his poems to use impor'tune. 

The value of having this general principle clear- 
ly in mind is shown when it comes to be applied 
to certain words which at a given moment seem 
to be trembling in the balance between the older 
and the newer accent. Thus, accessory and acces- 
sory; which? The latter, for the simple reason 
that that is the stress destined, by the law of reces- 
sive accent, to prevail. 

Likewise, of inqui'ry and in'quiry, the last is 
preferable, for the same reason. It would be mov- 
ing directly against a deep-lying linguistic law — 
a tendency inherent in the speech of the race — to 
try to make inqui'ry and acces'sory exclusive good 
use, at the expense of the later and better usage. 
As well might a child attempt to check a tidal 
wave. Current good usage must always be care- 



THE USE OF ENGLISH 137 

fully observed; but without the corrective knowl- 
edge of facts lying behind the present show of 
things, it is a dangerous guide ; it is the flower of 
which the historic life is the hidden but potent 
root. 

Another and important service rendered by a 
thorough knowledge of English old and new, is 
that it develops a sensitiveness to the vernacular, 
and a liking for the native word, phrase, idiom. 
Simplicity, strength, and beauty in speech are ap- 
preciated above a quasi or questionable elegance. 
There is a deal of culture in that feeling for lan- 
guage which gives preference to the idiom go to 
bed over to retire. The former stands for a large 
class of plain, direct, homely expressions, too often 
avoided by the linguistically ill-educated. When 
one falls into conversation with a stranger, one 
may judge him infallibly by this test : a brief ex- 
change of small talk reveals his station and degree 
with awful certainty — far more surely than do his 
dress and carriage. The habit of shoddy expres- 
sion in speech when one is desirous of making a 
good impression is astonishingly prevalent. In 
sooth, it takes something of education to feel the 
full value of a vigorous simplicity of utterance. 
The taste for a sort of bastard Websterianism of 
speech for the purposes of ordinary conversation 
is, I fear, peculiarly American : a survival, too, of 
older conditions. Dickens satirizes this manner of 
talk in "Martin Chuzzlewit," unkindly, perhaps, 
but hardly untruly — for the year of grace 1842. It 



138 FORCES IN FICTION 

is less fashionable now, just as the old-time oratory 
is less fashionable, being supplanted by the terse, 
pithy, plain-spoken style of public utterance. In 
this matter of vernacular directness our cousins 
English have always set us a good example,— one 
we are slowly but surely learning to follow. In 
the past, there may have lurked in our minds a 
conviction that the free use of euphuistic, absurdly 
showy words for very simple things was a sign of 
the possession of savoir faire : as confidence grows 
along with experience, the speech clarifies and 
takes on a seemly plainness. 

So inspiriting is it to hear truly idiomatic En- 
glish — English with grip to it as well as grace — 
that the pleasure breeds leniency toward that 
abuse of idiom commonly called "slang." The 
relations of the two have scarcely been set forth fo 
satisfaction. 

The kinship of slang and idiom is very close. 
They are blood-relations. Indeed, it might al- 
most be said that one is the other under a sobri- 
quet. Slang is often but idiom in the making. 
The idiom of to-day was slang in Shakspere's 
time; and the slang of this year may become ac- 
credited idiom a century hence. Nevertheless, the 
word slang, together with such other words as dia- 
lect, patois, argot, and their like, has something 
of a sinister implication; and it will be well to 
examine the case to see if the popular feeling 
about it be justified. 

Slang in the common meaning, is not only col- 



THE USE OF ENGLISH 139 

loquial speech, but speech that is low, vulgar ; any 
good dictionary definition supports this statement. 
Skeat, the authority in English etymology, derives 
the word, no doubt properly, from an ancient Scan- 
dinavian original which is seen in our verb to 
sling — so that when in our jocular American way 
we speak of "slinging language," we are going 
back to root flavors. Slang is language which is 
slung about recklessly, not to say profanely. It 
cannot be denied that some hard things are truth- 
fully to be spoken in its disfavor. Some of it is 
gutter-born and naturally dies the death of all 
disreputable outcasts. A good deal of it falls 
from the lips of thieves, gypsies, tramps and other 
such motley classes of society, regarded for the 
most part as outside the pale of decency. An ap- 
preciable amount of it, at least, is obscure, because 
of an inadmissible technicality; and, worse still, 
is unimaginatively narrow and unpicturesque — 
qualities that condemn it to a short life, and pre- 
clude its having any life that is more than local 
and uncertain. I have sometimes thought in noting 
the informal dialect of college students that they 
should have been able to show better invention in 
their creation of a fraternal jargon; it lacks 
variety, verve, inspiration. It is but justice to 
them to say that sometimes they live up to their 
opportunity and are racily original. But there 
is a reason for the fact that a good share of the 
slang so called — perhaps half of what is widely 
current at a given moment — perishes and perishes 



140 FORCES IN FICTION 

deservedly. If one interested in this stimulating 
subject will take the trouble to register half a 
dozen of the prevalent slang expressions at a cer- 
tain date and will then refer to them a couple of 
years thereafter, he will be instructed to his satis- 
faction in the ephemerality of much of this un- 
conventional current idiom. 

Yet this is only half the story. I implied as 
much in speaking of the inter-relations. Not all 
slang is bad: some of it is good, nay, delightful. 
It is created just as all living language is created 
— impulsively, with a certain joy in the creation, 
and at the call of the genuine need. It is an at- 
tempt at picturesqueness, liveliness, reality, and 
when it is not brought forth for too narrowly spe- 
cial a use nor by a parent morally debased, the 
slang word or expression is quite often acceptable. 
If this seems over-praise, conversion to the view 
will follow an examination of the facts. People are 
often shocked by a felicitous but unconventional 
idiom (which they call slang) not so much because 
their feelings are really outraged as because they 
imagine it is their duty to be shocked. It is a 
case of mock modesty; in their hearts there is a 
guilty enjoyment of such language. The real 
question is that of actual vulgarity; because the 
idiom is new or, what is taken to be the same 
thing, unknown, is no condemnation. This deeper- 
going question lies behind it: is the expression 
coarse, offensive to good taste, or out-and-out 
immoral? And to pronounce upon this is a very 



THE USE OF ENGLISH 141 

delicate test of one's knowledge of language, litera- 
ture, even of life itself. 

Now it is just the language-wielder with a feel- 
ing for idiom based upon a generous knowledge 
of English past and present, who is at once bold 
yet careful in his relation to slang, so called. 
Aware of the fact that slang is often excellent 
new idiom, he uses it with little fear of results; 
while he has, in his sensitiveness to what is truly 
good English, an all but infallible touchstone by 
which to detect the merely low and ephemeral. 
It follows that his language is delightfully free 
from pedantic stiffness or mawkish euphuism. It 
possesses the racy quality that is the very salt of 
speech, and a freedom that strikes prudes as 
audacious at times, yet has a felicity recognizable 
even by those who have neither the courage nor the 
education to go and do likewise. He prefers to 
handle the native vocabulary "After the use of 
the English in straight-flung words and few," as 
Kipling has it. He knows that the foreign ele- 
ments of a tongue are for ornamentation or special 
application; that the vernacular is the back-bone. 

It is in respect of such considerations that a 
study of English, an interest in the mother speech 
extending far beyond the days of formal school- 
ing, commend themselves to all. There is an ex- 
haustless attraction in it. Moreover, an assured 
comprehension of the subject is the best possible 
basis for all appreciation of our literature from 
Beowulf to Browning, — is, in fact, the only safe 



142 FORCES IN FICTION 

and sure substructure for any literary apprecia- 
tion. One who begins the study of Chaucer, of 
Spenser or of Shakspere without this advantage, 
trips on the first page ; it is inevitable. Thus the 
study of language and the study of literature, 
though unfortunately too much treated as if they 
were utterly apart, the one a science, the other 
an art, are in reality so closely co-ordinate as to be 
but phases of the one great subject; language the 
instrument, literature the alluring, the inspiriting, 
the multitudinous airs that can be played upon it. 



A NOTE ON MODERN CRITICISM 

Literary criticism has always been of two main 
kinds: the objective, which applies rules and be- 
lieves in standards; the subjective, which, with 
less care for canons, gives freer play to personal 
impressions. Some of the later doyens of letters 
belong to the impressionistic school, but of old 
the weight of authority was with those who ap- 
pealed to tradition. And there was an authority 
in this method, a stability and dignity in the judg- 
ments thus reached, which made them imposing, 
even admirable. Nisard summed up the creed in 
saying : "I could not love without preferring, and 
I could not prefer without doing injustice." The 
personal equation is here reduced to the vanishing 
point. Jeffrey, with his famous critique of Words- 
worth, beginning, "This will never do," affords a 
fine example of the same thing. A nobler illustra- 
tion is Matthew Arnold, whose appeal to compari- 
sons and insistence on a standard are academic 
in the best sense. In the hands of such a man, 
objective criticism is discovered to be full of vir- 
tues. But with an older school — with Boileau in 
France, to name one leader — the danger was a 
stiffening into the mechanical, loss of breadth, and 
insensitiveness to an enlightened enjoyment as the 
ultimate test. 

143 



144 FORCES IN FICTION 

With Sainte-Beuve, however (still looking to 
France, the land of criticism, par excellence), 
came a change. Taine, Kenan, younger men like 
Jules Lemaitre, with all their personal variations, 
admit more of the subjective, see the subject 
through the color of their temperament; and of 
modern criticism as a whole it may be said that it 
has become autobiographical. The critic an- 
nounces : "Gentlemen, I propose to talk of myself 
in relation to Shakspere, Eacine, Pascal, Goethe." 
In some cases this is pushed to an absurd or of- 
fensive degree, until we get a parody on literary 
judgments. But Mr. William M. Payne, in his 
recent book, "Little Leaders," goes too far in his 
condemnation of the subjective test. Professor 
Trent, in a well-considered paper to be found in a 
still later volume of essays, views the matter more 
broadly when" he points out the share of truth in 
both the objective and subjective methods. Many 
of our ablest and most charming writers favor it : 
Stevenson, for an Englishman (who isn't En- 
glish), Howells, for an American. The advan- 
tages of the latter are obvious: appreciating the 
truth in de gustibus, the critic gives his opinion 
for what it is worth, tolerant of dispute or dissent. 
He becomes intimate with us : we are more likely 
to love him. In addition to stimulation in litera- 
ture, we are having dealings with a strong, pleas- 
ing personality, perhaps. The gain here is all in 
the direction of life, savor, reality. On the other 
hand, a besetting sin of this method is lack of 



A NOTE ON MODERN CRITICISM 145 

culture. Any one can set up to write esoteric crit- 
icism. But when, as with M. Lemaitre, there is 
wide reading, an assimilation of the best models, 
the issue, be it confessed, is delightful. 

In all likelihood, the question will always be 
debatable. The modern tendency, no doubt, leans 
towards the subjective; individualism for the mo- 
ment is paramount in literature. The pendulum 
swings to that side of equilibrium. Personal pref- 
erence is the starting-point of all honest enjoy- 
ment and appreciation of literature. To praise a 
book because we think it ought to be praised, not 
because we find it praiseworthy, is intellectual sui- 
cide. Yet few of us wish to go so far as to deny 
that literary art has some permanent laws and 
standards. The slow consensus of the best opinion 
(with some erratic individual variations) rallies 
around the works which obey these laws and con- 
form to these standards. To listen to the still, 
small voice within, and yet to find a reason-for- 
being in the voice of time and authority, that is 
the delicate and difficult business of the serious- 
minded critic. The present-day tendency alluded 
to is an exaggeration, but, if an excess, it must be 
wholesomer, truer than the other, earlier excess, 
which stretched every literary creation upon the 
narrow Procrustean bed of convention and judged 
its size thereby. 

To justify the modern tendency it must be 
shown that the long-cherished dicta pronouncing 
art a thing of rule and standard, of well-defined 



146 FORCES IN FICTION 

laws and unsurpassable boundaries, are not found- 
ed upon fact; or at least, have been given undue 
prominence. The latter hits near to the truth. 
There is more argument for this thesis than at 
first appears. An illustrative analogy may be 
drawn from the sister art of music. Our concep- 
tions of what is right and beautiful in the aesthetic 
tone-world are based upon the seven-note scale; 
but with the Chinese, for example, the five-note 
scale is the norm and starting point. Truly, it is 
a purely subjective process of reasoning to assert 
that good music necessarily derives from the seven- 
note scale. The ear of most modern peoples ac- 
cepts that scale, and rejects that of the Mongolians 
as displeasing; voila tout. The whole development 
of European music on its technical side rests thus 
upon an assumption it would take more than the 
subtlest metaphysics of a schoolman to show to be 
anything but unproved. At the best, an appeal 
to the history of music might force us to concede 
that the western scale has given to the world richer 
results; that the civilized folk have adopted the 
octave while those semi-civilized or worse have in- 
vented the five-note or other scales. But who dare 
say that some scale of the future shall not produce 
music as superior to that made upon the seven-note 
idea as the latter is superior to the five-note ? In 
other words, musical technique is bottomed upon 
an arbitrary standard and not upon eternal laws. 
It is relative, not absolute, in its nature. In the 
domain of ethics a similar substitution of relative 



A NOTE ON MODERN CRITICISM 147 

for absolute has been brought about. The con- 
science is still regarded as innate by conservative 
thinkers who accept the sense of right and wrong 
as directly God-given ; but in the Spencerian view 
it is explained as a matter of racial experience, 
utilitarian in its origin. Latter-day psychology 
inclines to this theory ; and, as a result, it may be 
found working in the philosophy of literature 
and of aesthetics. This thought tendency when 
transferred to literary criticism irresistibly leads 
towards a more personal and less hide-bound inter- 
pretation of the phenomena of literature. 

But this much may be said with certitude : The 
individual sense of moral right and wrong may be 
subject to a long historical evolution and may, 
during that process, show constantly higher ideals ; 
yet, whatever the ideal — grotesque, incomplete, 
immoral at a given time and place — once accepted, 
moral health depends upon eschewing what is 
deemed wrong and cleaving to what is deemed 
right. So in literary art, the aesthetic sense and 
the laws thereto conforming demand that the 
artist obey an ideal of the beautiful. Disobey it, 
and the art product becomes unaesthetic, lying be- 
yond the province of art. This aesthetic ideal may, 
however, shift or vary according to racial differ- 
ences and those of time. Yes, it may even differ 
(within limits) in the case of two cultured per- 
sons of the same race, place and day. But the 
concurrent critical opinion of the human intelli- 
gence directed upon the materials of literature 



148 FORCES IN FICTION 

does insist upon some ideal, and in all periods 
and lands bases appreciation of the artistic prod- 
uct upon the sense of pleasure. What pleases — 
using pleasure in the broad sense to include that 
which emotionally arouses — is within the pale, 
what is not pleasing lies without. It is not enough 
that a person be pleased — the individual artist or 
amateur; there must be wide agreement in order 
that the variables incidental to the personal equa- 
tion be eliminated as far as possible. Subtracting 
all discrepancies and variances of ideal, a residuum 
is left which declares for the ever clarifying per- 
sistence of the beauty-sense. So much may with 
modesty, in the light of present psychology, be 
claimed for judgments upon literary art. And 
this position should be taken sturdily against those 
who would upset all canons and plead for the un- 
licensed expression of personality. A technique of 
the art — however it may have changed with the 
change of ideal — has always and must always 
exist. 

But to go further and argue for changeless laws 
entirely outside the human mind which makes and 
accepts them, is dangerous. 

Modern criticism, then, is aware of this general 
change of front towards canons hitherto held to 
be absolute and invariable ; and its increased sub- 
jectivity, with the substitution of the personal im- 
pression for the historical laws, is more than in- 
dividual whim, being in accord with a widespread 
and typical intellectual process. It is not wise, 



A NOTE ON MODERN CRITICISM 149 

therefore, to regard this subjective tendency of 
criticism as egoistic in a bad sense. In its genesis, 
at bottom, such a habit is an instinct toward hon- 
esty. In the hands of the right sort of man the 
results of this manner of literary appreciation are 
both illuminating and stimulating. The reader 
catches the contagion of enthusiasm and receives 
a liberating sense of his own right to first-hand 
enjoyment. He makes bold to like a given piece 
of literature not because he must, but because it 
appeals to him, and here beginneth all truthful 
enjoyment in letters. 



LITERATURE AS CRAFT 

I 

The Love of the Fine Phkase 

The whole accomplishment, the whole desire 
of literature, may be resolved into the love for 
the fine phrase. Alfred de Musset once confessed, 
half-shamefacedly, his deep joy in phrasing; and 
always to the true maker in letters what is of 
supreme importance is the way one says things. 
To lavish infinite pains upon the manner of one's 
work is to be of the elect. We call Frenchmen 
like Flaubert and the De Goncourts men-of-letters, 
par excellence, just because this was with them a 
consuming ambition, — to seek the fittest, finest, 
most impeccable expression. More than is perhaps 
realized, the fine phrase makes the difference be- 
tween platitude and 'the play of genius. Lowell 
has discoursed wisely of this, pointing out that 
what seems a striking thought becomes, on analy- 
sis, a striking medium for the conveyance of a 
thought which, less richly, less graciously, less 
boldly dressed, would be catalogued as a common- 
place. Times innumerable, matter and manner 
are thus confused. 

The usual sneer at this love for the fine phrase 
imputes shallowness and a worship of the aesthetic 

150 



LITERATURE AS CRAFT 151 

divorced from the intellectual and the ethical. 
The imputation is unfair and may, by a return 
thrust, itself be called shallow. For the fine phrase 
implies the fine personality behind it : an individ- 
uality of interest, a happy gift, a force not of 
earth's predicable creatures. Literary style, while 
it may be striven for and though it waits on wor- 
shipful toil, cannot be commanded; its will is the 
wind's will, after all. ''When style revisits me," 
writes Kobert Louis Stevenson, in those precious 
"Vailima Letters," and he said it all in four 
words. A craftsman he was, if ever one wielded 
English speech; but he knew that diction would 
come with inspiration, not before. With all his 
cunning, he was not its master ; style was his 
mistress, to be wooed and won, an eternal femi- 
nine. In the physical world motion generates 
heat and light; in the psychical world heat and 
light are generated by emotion. And heat and 
light are the wings of style. 

It may seem to some a poor quest, this of the 
fine phrase. The communication of ideas being 
the most obvious mission of language, is there not 
something puerile, even piddling, in an aspiration 
for the right marshalling of words? Can this be 
a valid life-work for grown men and women? 
Verily, yes. For to make fine phrases is to create 
beauty ; and to create beauty is to have commerce 
with the Eternal, — mortality's highest privilege. 
Then, too, fine phrases inevitably are associated 
with fine ideas — those apian miracles which at the 



152 FORCES IN FICTION 

chance clangor of a word swarm in the brain-hive 
and deposit their amber sweets for the writer's 
behoof — and for posterity's. 

Moreover, the power of the fine phrase is greater 
among men than they are aware, the fascination 
of style likely to be belittled. Even the Philistine, 
who would be first to pooh-pooh our glorification 
of diction, is moved, albeit unaware, by the apt 
turn, the smooth flow of the sentence, the sudden 
flash of metaphor, the musical cadence, the start- 
ling felicity of antithesis. He is subtly pleased, 
he reads on and on, and thinks, good easy man, it 
is little to do, that he is most concerned with 
mind-stuff. Ah, the agonies, the long trying, the 
failures innumerous, the despaired-of perfections 
that are back of and under that easy accomplish- 
ment. Ma3^hap our Philistine deems pleasure but 
a trifling thing to strive for, and hence puts the 
pleasuremaker on a par with the mountebank. 
Yet let him be honest with himself, and he shall 
find that pleasure — joy, happiness, the name mat- 
ters not — is life's one conceivable guerdon, the 
only key to the mystery of mortality. To give 
pleasure to the knowing few is to be an artist, 
and the fine phrase is one of the legitimate artistic 
methods of pleasure-giving. Since all men, ac- 
cording to their light and degree of culture, are 
a-search for pleasure, and many find it in that fit 
arid beautiful expression of personality which we 
call style in literature, the function of the fine 
phrase is justified ; for it is seen to take its place 



LITERATURE AS CRAFT 153 

in the economy of nature, meeting a real demand. 
To the serious artist in words, it is little less than 
a religion, this cult of the fine phrase. Here he 
will not sin, whatever he do in his daily walks. 
This temple he will not profane, the spirit that 
presides over it being august, lovely, without stain. 
Such a place is meet, he must fain feel, for his 
choicest sacrifices. 

II 

What is Literary Merit? 

The things which in a deep sense we know and 
understand best are hardest to define. Love is 
the greatest motor-power on the earth, the com- 
mon experience and the common glory of man- 
kind. Yet who dares define it, to set a mete and 
a bound for humanity's master-passion? It is 
somewhat thus with such an intangible quality or 
characteristic as excellence in letters; we appre- 
hend it readily enough, we mourn its absence, we 
thrill under a consciousness of its charm, but we 
are dazed a little at first when the question is put, 
plump and direct : What, then, is literary merit ? 

To come boldly at the difficulty, literary merit 
is that quality in writing which relates, not to 
the things said, but to the manner of saying 
things. It is, strictly speaking, a matter of form, 
and nothing else. 

Emerson is literature, not because he is a great 
thinker in ethics or philosophy, but because he 



154 FORCES IN FICTION 

utters his thoughts in a certain beautiful and in- 
communicable fashion. The Bible, entirely apart 
from its value as a religious teacher, is a wonder- 
ful literary repository, simply because a set of 
men back in the early seventeenth century, when 
the diction of Marlowe and of Shakspere, of Ben 
Jonson and of Beaumont and Fletcher was in the 
air, were inspired to put its proverbs, its parables 
and its psalms into such language as has never been 
equaled in English before or since. If this defini- 
tion be correct, it becomes evident that books lying 
outside of what is called belles-lettres may have 
literary merit. When one who has a genius for 
expression writes, for example, upon science, he 
still makes literature ; as witness a Humboldt or a 
Huxley. Whenever or wherever a man sets down 
his thoughts in a way which attracts, moves and 
charms by its style, or its manner of saying 
things, that man has literary merit, and no man 
else can be said to possess it. 

Some may perhaps incline to take offense at this 
simple explanation of literary excellence. fr What," 
they will cry, "the great effects of literature, the 
brilliancy and beauty, the wit and pathos, which 
have so often held us thrall, all this to be resolved 
into a trick of the trade, a legerdemain of rhe- 
toric?" 

The answer to such an outbreak is not far to 
seek. Expression, at its best and in its normal 
function, is not a self-conscious act in which the 
writer stands off and strives to produce an im- 



LITERATURE AS CRAFT 155 

pression, but is, rather, in some degree, a revela- 
tion ; so that each man who makes literature gives 
the world, in his writings, a sort of simulacrum of 
his own personality, of that essence which is he, 
as against every other personality in existence. 
Nay, it is more than a simulacrum, for the whole 
creature is in it, brain and body, heart and soul. 
From his manner of saying things you gather an 
idea of what manner of man he is; not so much 
what he is in actual, every-day life as what he is 
potentially, -in his possibilities, according as God 
made him. 

But in setting up this definition of literary 
merit, it may still be objected that no true touch- 
stone has been given to guide one in pronouncing 
for or against a man's claim to write literature. 
Granted that the manner of saying things is the 
test, how may this manner be distinguished ? what 
are its earmarks? the elements or characteristics 
which go to make it? Perhaps the most common 
reply to this highly pertinent question is to cata- 
logue, as do the rhetoricians, those qualities which 
are admirable in and essential to good writing: 
as simplicity, fitness and beauty, perspicuity, force 
and elegance, and so forth. But the trouble here 
is, that opinions are apt to differ as to what is 
beauty, or elegance, or force. 

Perspicuity, clearness, common folk might agree 
pretty well on; but when we come to the other 
qualities, there is sure to be confusion worse con- 
founded. When a stump orator out West told a 



156 FORCES IN FICTION 

friend of mine that he had read Bunyan's "Pil- 
grim's Progress" and found it interesting, but that 
it had no literary merit, he showed that his sense 
of the qualities that go to the making of such 
merit was erratic, half -developed. 

A housemaid the other day informed me that 
a missing article was in "the nurse's apartment." 
Now, the place she referred to was a small, plainly 
furnished room of perhaps ten by twelve feet. 
To call it "an apartment" was absurd, because 
that word gave a false idea of its fitting-up and of 
its size. The word "room" would have been bet- 
ter, because fitter and simpler; moreover, because 
it is a native Saxon word and hence preferable to 
the Eomance word, "apartment," which is used un- 
necessarily and wrongly in nine cases out of ten. 

These examples serve to illustrate my point, 
which is, that it is insufficient and dangerous to 
insist on a certain number of qualities as con- 
stituting the literary manner of saying things. 
Such categories are of avail in giving students a 
notion of what is to be aimed at in writing; but 
they are not satisfactory in defining what is style 
— that subtle and wonderful thing. That an ob- 
servance of the laws of grammar is at the basis of 
style hardly needs the saying; such observance 
leads to correct writing, but not necessarily to the 
producing of literature, any more than the founda- 
tion walls of a building settle the question of its 
subsequent architectural ugliness or beauty. I 
would choose a more subjective test than that of 



LITERATURE AS CRAFT 157 

the rhetorics, and would affirm that a perception 
of the manner of saying things which constitutes 
literary merit can only be reached by a constant 
and catholic reading of the best literature. 

By heredity one can have almost an intuition 
of what is good, so that the life's reading is begun 
with a great advantage over another who has no 
bookish ancestry; but even the latter can acquire 
this sixth sense by dint of wise and multifarious 
contact with books. The stump orator could not 
see the beauty of Bunyan simply for the reason 
that he had not got into his blood the rhythm of 
fine prose, nor a feeling for the virile strength of 
Saxon methods of expression. My maid thought 
"apartment" more high-sounding and aristocratic 
than "room," because she had not read enough 
and heard enough good speech to learn the great 
lesson that in both written and spoken words, 
other things being equal, the simplest is always 
the best. 

By constant and intelligent communion with 
the master spirits of English letters, and then, if 
possible, with those of foreign literature, the reader 
comes to recognize intuitively and with perfect 
ease the distinction and charm of manner which 
make literature. He learns, too, that the manner 
itself may vary almost as often as do the men 
who speak; that Addison and Carlyle both write 
literature, yet are at the antipodes of style ; that 
the glory of Walt Whitman is one and the glory 
of Tennyson is another. Yet will he discover that 



158 FORCES IN FICTION 

all have somewhat in common, though with infi- 
nite variations and manifold divergencies ; that all 
possess a common gift and a common distinction 
which lead us to declare them makers of literature 
and masters of the mighty art of letters. 

Coming back, then, to our starting point, liter- 
ary merit lies in the manner of saying things. 
Original thought, noble conception, poetic imag- 
ining, these are precious ; but unless they be poured 
into the transmuting mold of expression they are 
not of themselves enough to constitute literature. 
And the way to gain the power of knowing this 
great gift of expression is for the reader to ac- 
quaint himself or herself with the books pro- 
nounced by the calm, sure judgment of the cen- 
turies to be the best and most worthy to live — 
books that possess what Austin Dobson has called 
"Time's great antiseptic, style." And in the case 
of the writer, this same reading should be supple- 
mented by a steady, unwearying use of the pen, 
since only thus will it gradually acquire a power 
mightier than the sword, even as persuasion is 
mightier than violence and the shaping of souls 
more than the mutilation of the body. 

Ill 

Music and Emotion in Poetry 

Alliteration, or the rhyming of initial letters, is 
a device which, used either in prose or poetry, is 
likely to be despised and misunderstood by those 



LITERATURE AS CRAFT 159 

who incline to snap- judgments. This is due in 
part to ignorance, in part to the patent abuse of 
alliteration, as seen, for example, in the head- 
lines of sensational journalism, or, if literature 
be in evidence, in the verse of such a man as Swin- 
burne, whose alliterative tours de force are alone 
in modern poetry for self-consciousness and per- 
sistency. But the fact is — and it is well to em- 
phasize and illustrate it — that alliteration is a 
thing of historical dignity in English verse (and 
English prose as well), and is, moreover, in es- 
sence and primarily a psychic phenomenon. 

Let me show what is meant, first, as to the his- 
tory of this characteristic of the technique of po- 
etry, confining the discussion to verse, as the form 
of literature wherein alliteration is most plainly 
to be seen in its workings. As is well known to 
students of English verse, alliteration precedes 
rhyme in the historical development of our native 
poetry. Ehyme (which is the sound-agreement of 
words at the end of a line in contradistinction 
from the initial-letter rh}Tning which we call allit- 
eration) came into English from the medieval 
Latin hymns through the French, and we do not 
find it used till long after the Norman Conquest. 
But for centuries before this, poetry was culti- 
vated as an art, and had its definite, artistic laws 
and formularies; and the particular device which 
was the predecessor of rhyme as a means of music- 
making (which is, as we shall see in a moment, 
the object both of rhyme and alliteration) is allit- 



160 FORCES IN FICTION 

eration. Let me illustrate from a famous Anglo- 
Saxon poem, the epic of "Beowulf/' our first great 
English epic. The following is a typical line from 
the poem: 

"Oft Scyld Scefing Sceathena threatum"— 
Often Scyld, son of Scef, with troops of warriors—. 

Here, be it observed, we find three alliterative 
words, and, noting the literal translation placed 
under the line, we see that those words are im- 
portant noun-words. Now, without going into 
the minutiae of the matter, it is sufficient to say 
that the normal Anglo-Saxon line of poetry is 
built in this way, showing two alliterations in the 
first half of the verse and one at least in the sec- 
ond half, and that the accents fall on the alliter- 
ative word, which is necessarily an important one 
in both grammar and meaning. There are sub- 
divisions and finesses of this main law, such as to 
make the construction of old English verse a 
highly wrought and intricate affair. And yet here 
is a poem whence the illustration is drawn, writ- 
ten presumably in the seventh or eighth century, 
hundreds of years before rhyme, as now under- 
stood, was dreamed of in English. How foolish 
and ignorant, in the face of such data, to speak 
of the earliest English poetry, and of art in this 
field, as rough and inartistic ! Nevertheless so it 
is treated in the majority of manuals on English 
literature. 

In a word, then, alliteration, instead of be- 



LITERATURE AS CRAFT 161 

ing a more or less flimsy trick of the trade in 
poetry, is an art-law which reigned supreme for 
centuries in our older and noble poetic products, 
and which, moreover, I want to show is still a 
legitimate and even necessary device and aid to 
expression when rightly used. All the best mod- 
ern verse proves this, and I shall try to make this 
plain under my second thesis, namely, that alliter- 
ation is a psychic phenomenon, and hence is an 
inevitable accompaniment to true and inspired 
poetry. 

For consider for a moment that both rhyme and 
alliteration, as hinted above, are means of secur- 
ing music in the poem; this is their sole raison 
d'&tre. Ehyme, by the consonance of vowels and 
consonants, and by more definitely marking the 
rhythm of the verse, adds to the musicalness there- 
of ; and alliteration, by the repetition of identical 
letters rhythmically distributed in a line, produces 
likewise an effect of music and a desirable tone- 
color, less full and rich, however, than rhyme, but 
nevertheless a musical effect. Now the next thing 
to notice is the interesting and perfectly demon- 
strable dictum that in poetry there is a direct rela- 
tion between emotion and music; that is, a poet 
makes music in so far as he is emotionally vibrant 
and alive. But if alliteration be one way of gain- 
ing an effect of music, it follows logically that the 
singer emotionally creative will instinctively and 
of necessity make use of alliteration as one means 
of securing the desired result. 



162 FORCES IN FICTION 

This explains what I mean in stating that allit- 
eration is a psychic phenomenon ; it is an outward 
and visible token of an inward (subjective) and 
poetic state or condition on the part of the bard. 
If we accept this definition — and it seems to be a 
sound and philosophical one — we are in a posi- 
tion at once to understand the true function of 
this so often disesteemed characteristic of formal 
poetry, and, with this touchstone, to pronounce 
on what is good or bad in alliteration. Allitera- 
tion is, then, a mark of emotion, and its effect is 
to add music to the poet's work. If a spurt of 
lyric feeling tends to alliterative language this 
should be apparent in both prose and poetry. As 
a matter of fact it is apparent; and, confining 
myself still to verse, I will give an example or 
two. 

Once on a time Walter Savage Landor wrote 
a splendid piece of blank verse to Eobert Brown- 
ing, beginning : 

"Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's, 
Therefore of him, no speech." 

And the praise herein tendered by the golden- 
tongued classicist to the chief dramatic singer of 
our century, culminates with a marked sibilant 
alliteration in the lines: 

"Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where 
The siren waits thee, singing song for song." 

The artistic climax calls for and produces an 
alliterative richness lacking, and rightly lacking, 



LITERATURE AS CRAFT 163 

in the preceding lines. Hence, this is an example 
of what may be called legitimate, organic allitera- 
tion; by which is meant, alliteration correspond- 
ing with the march and culmination of the poem. 
In the superb little lyric, "Home Thoughts from 
Abroad/' the bard here apostrophized by Landor 
furnishes another example: 

"And after April, when May follows, 
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! 
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge 
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover 
Blossoms and dewdrops— at the bent spray's edge— 
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over. 
Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first fine careless rapture!" 

And in those two closing lines notice the double 
alliteration on / and c, so distributed as to pro- 
duce the finest effect. The climax, which is more 
emotional than in Landor's blank verse, is an 
impulsive leap of creative expression and lo ! allit- 
eration comes to enrich the language use and 
deepen the music. It is not "alliteration's artful 
aid" here, but something far more natural and 
significant. Indeed, that line, "alliteration's art- 
ful aid," has done harm no end in spreading this 
misconception that alliteration is always a self- 
conscious and technical affair, never psychic, per- 
sonal and spontaneous. It is worth noting that 
the four additional lines in this poem of Brown- 
ing's have almost an effect of anticlimax, after the 
splendid alliterative and emotional crest of feeling 
in the passage just quoted. 



164 FORGES IN FICTION 

Examples might be multiplied indefinitely, for 
all literature is full of them. The principle which 
is evolved from such modern instances seems to be 
that the right kind of alliteration comes in spurts 
correspondent to emotive impulses, and will be, 
consequently, irregular and not regular in occur- 
rence. This is the reason why the alliteration of 
Swinburne strikes a false note so often and be- 
comes offensive at times. That great poet makes 
use of the device almost as systematically as did 
the Anglo-Saxon gleemen, with whom, as was 
shown, it was a definite, artistic law of poetics. 
In other words, alliteration with Swinburne is not 
inevitably conjoined with lyric intensity, but is 
used coldly, self-consciously. Hence, a sense in 
the reader that it is artificial. It ceases to have 
dynamic, psychic significancy, and becomes a 
purely formal and sensuous enrichment or orna- 
mentation of the verse. Let me give a single il- 
lustration. In "Anactoria," a certain passage ends 
with the line, 

"Memories shall mix and metaphors of me." 

Here it hardly needs saying that both thought 
and phraseology preclude the possibility of an 
emotional state ; yet the m alliteration is excessive. 
Thousands of examples of this tendency in the 
author of "Laus Veneris" could be cited. I do not 
for a moment mean to say that plenty of Swin- 
burne's poems might not be mentioned in which 
a masterful handling of alliteration is linked with 



LITERATURE AS CRAFT 165 

the most fervent feeling and an irresistibly song- 
ful lilt. But, speaking by and large, an effect of 
artificiality is indubitably made by Swinburne's 
technique in this particular, and he offers the most 
striking modern instance of the abuse of one of 
the oldest art laws in English poetry, and deserves 
careful study with this single characteristic in 
mind. 

"Yes," objects the critic, "but why is it worse 
for Swinburne to use alliteration thus consciously 
and steadily than for the Anglo-Saxons to do so, 
as you have confessed they did?" The answer is 
that to the Old English bard this method of music- 
making was what rhyme is now in English verse ; 
but Swinburne, in addition to a lavish and won- 
derful use of rlrvme music, superadds this music 
of alliteration, and the result is a cloying rich- 
ness, an over-lusciousness which is often dwelt 
upon in any analysis of his work. 

A man who has Swinburne's intense love of his 
art and a supreme gift for music in verse, and 
whose handling of alliteration is marked yet 
sharply divergent from the English poet's inas- 
much as it is natural and correspondent to emo- 
tion, not artificial and formal, is Sidney Lanier. 
The flush and fire of much of his lyric work is 
brought about, among other things, by his allitera- 
tive prodigality. But a study of him will reveal 
the distinction made between him and a Swin- 
burne in this regard. Take his perfect song "The 
Dove" and let us look at the closing stanza : 



166 FORCES IN FICTION 

"Nay, if ye three, O Morn! O Spring! O Heart! 
Should chant grave unisons of grief and love, 
Ye could not mourn with more melodious art 

Than daily doth yon dim sequestered dove." 

Here there is a strong alliterative effect, secured 
by the m and d rlrymes of the two verses that 
bring the lyric to a close. Here, also, is a dis- 
tinct rhetorical and lyrical climax of a subtly 
quiet but strong and lovely sort. This may be 
realized by any one who reads the three preceding 
stanzas which lead up to the comparison whose 
quintessence is expressed in these closing lines. 
Therefore, this is a classic example of fit and spon- 
taneous alliteration. The one law of right use is, 
as Lanier himself has said, that the poet be hon- 
est; by which he meant that he be not self-con- 
scious, nor his linguistics and metrics studied at 
the moment of composition. Sidney Lanier is 
alliterative to an extent without parallel among 
American poets (unless Poe be excepted), but only 
because his genius was intensely lyrical and he 
was a natural music-maker. Swinburne, contrari- 
wise, while also a true and exquisite lyrist, has 
made the mistake of riding alliteration to death, 
forcing it to become a set, formal law in his work ; 
and so we hear, too often, the creak of the ma- 
chinery coming in to disturb the God-given melody 
of his song. 

Our study of alliteration then, even thus in 
brief, leads to a very decided opinion and to firm 
ground of theory. It is, we see, a thing of legit- 
imacy and of great importance in the develop- 



LITERATURE AS CRAFT 167 

ment of English poetry — indeed, of all poetry. It 
is not a pretty verbal trick to tickle our ears 
withal, but, rather, is inwrought with the being of 
man when he is creatively inspired to literary pro- 
duction. It is, to be sure, capable of abuse, as is 
well exemplified in the case of Swinburne; but, 
in its purity and right use, it constitutes one of 
the chief beauties of the technique of poetry. Ex- 
actly the same line of argument can be applied to 
prose, and illustrations are legion from our best 
prose writers. It can also be shown that allitera- 
tion in maxims and proverbs has both a mnemonic 
and an artistic function. But this is a subject by 
itself. In our mighty prose authors it will be 
found that their places and periods of rhetorical 
climax and creative splendor are rich with alliter- 
ation at its finest and freest. 

However, the discussion has here been limited 
to verse, and I repeat as a summary : Alliteration 
in any serious study of English poetry must be re- 
garded as a mark of emotion, a psychic phenom- 
enon, having definite and close relations to the 
spirit of the man who seizes on it instinctively as 
an aid to and ornament of expression. 



INDOOKS AND OUT: TWO KEVEKIES 

I 

Before the Fire 

What a walk is in the early spring woods, with 
its chance of finding the trailing arbutus shy-hid 
beneath the dead brown leaves or of thrilling 
again at the sight of the stainless white bloom of 
the bloodroot, such to midwinter is the indoor 
open fire on the hearth. Twin delights these, 
each after its kind, growing with the years and 
fuller associations. 

To-day, returning from the city, I note the 
bleakness of the western sky and hear in the inter- 
mittent wind-gust a doleful presage of storm and 
a shut-in frozen world on the morrow. But my 
thoughts outfly me homeward, and I pluck up 
heart at the image that is evoked of a cheery blaze 
and a backlog that gravely drones a soothing bass 
to the vibrant, nervous treble of the flames aspir- 
ing, striving, and at last paling down to embers 
and eventual ashes. And even so the reality. 
That mundane matter, dinner, dispatched, and 
slippers donned, I am in front of the polished 
andirons that twinkle reflections of the facile 
lights. Cozy in my big Sleepy-Hollow armchair, 
I can listen in a very unction of creature comfort 

168 



INDOORS AND OUT 1G9 

to the somber wail or leonine roar of the wind out- 
side, enjoying vicariously for all less lucky 
mortals. 

What a long, weary journey has civilized man 
taken since the first fire of like kind was lighted 
for enheartenment against darkness, cold, hunger, 
loneliness ! And yet, with the vast deal that has 
been learned and sloughed off and forgotten, back 
he comes to this primitive solace to find it all- 
sufficing and, in truth, the acme of nineteenth- 
century luxury. The thought has its reproof, its 
warning. But since the day our forefathers piled 
high the great rough-hewn branches in the hall 
and quaffed ale and mead from curiously chased 
cups as the flames licked lithely toward the smoke 
dark rafters, much has entered imaginatively in- 
to the wood fire as a fact in life, to broaden and 
enrich its content and suggestion. The literature 
of our own country has thrown on many a stick 
to yield a more ethereal glow. The wood fire has 
put on a mystic aspect since Poe wrote his "Kaven" 
before it: 

And each separate dying ember 
Wrought its ghost upon the floor. 

Longfellow's "Tales of a Wayside Inn" had never 
crept so warmly into our affections had it not 
been the emanation of the group about the back- 
log. Hawthorne, too, in his wonder-tales, needs 
to be read with this sibilant, colorful background. 
And what were the gentle imaginings of Ik Mar- 



170 FORCE 8 IN FICTION 

vel, without a fire to look deep into and to search 
for his source of inspiration. Nor can we unseat 
Mr. Warner from his ingle quarters, emitting wit 
and wisdom as the wood emits sparks and suffus- 
ing the atmosphere with the steadfast radiance 
of a kindly heart, even as the clear blue flame from 
the driftwood lights up the room, making it home- 
ly and habitable. These and other like mages of 
the pen have, with a potent species of wizardry, 
made every flame-spurtle emblematic and each 
stage in this conflict of the elements in petto a 
precious thing to see and to remember. 

When the fire is high and the crackle of the 
hickory as merry a sound as the gleam thereof is 
cheer}', playing hide-and-seek in the uttermost 
corners of the study, a sense of housed satisfac- 
tion, of sensual warmth and lazy peace, unite to 
make a mood of serene though inexpressive pleas- 
ure. But as the logs give up inchwise their sturdy 
length, and are resolved into a charred and broken 
semblance of their sometime selves, the mood 
shifts into reminiscence, reverie, and so shades 
imperceptibly into melancholy. This pensive 
state, this role of "II Penseroso," is a sort of 
natural outflow of the precedent stage of quiescent 
delight. Wordsworth speaks of: 

That sweet mood when pleasant thoughts 
Bring sad thoughts to the mind; 

and this well describes what goes on in my soul 
before the fire. Now, see, my eyes are fathoms 



INDOORS AND OUT 171 

deep in the glowing coals, ruby red and scintillat- 
ing like the irises of a snake, while for a setting 
all around is the soft, harmonious, dreamy gray 
of the ashes. How at peace they are and how 
beautiful, after the brief fury and festal display 
of the fire ! Is it true, then, that this is the inev- 
itable issue of motion and color, warmth and 
fragrant odor and pleasances of song? In pur- 
suance of the somber thought I reach out to the 
bookcase, take down Schopenhauer from the shelf, 
and read a passage wherein the Apostle of Nega- 
tion eloquently apostrophizes that giving up of life 
and the lust of life which alone, he deems, offers 
a solution of the stress and agony of human 
things. If he be right, the quintessence of wis- 
dom has been exemplified in the burning of these 
branches from the forest which grows outside my 
window. 

They have had their moment of keen, vivid life, 
but, lest activity become torture and zest satiety, 
they have exchanged restlessness for sleep and an- 
nihilation. Purged in the fierce purgation of 
flame, theirs is the stainless lot and the Nirvana 
which is good. By irresistible analogy the mind 
takes up the mortal case and the age-old query, 
What of Life beyond? knocks at the door of con- 
sciousness with dreary insistence. More often than 
not when such questions come we blink at them, 
turning away with some ready excuse or so im- 
mersed in the hour's duties that such-like prob- 
lems are put aside for the nonce, to be taken up 



172 FORGES IN FICTION 

at some pat opportunity. We are fully aware that 
the riddle for us is still unsolved ; we believe hon- 
estly that some day it will be proved in grim earn- 
est. But alas ! the continual putting off acts like 
a narcotic, until indifference is begotten and we 
drift along with no clear notion where the path 
ends or whither it would lead us. We have put 
the question so carefully away for future refer- 
ence, that it is lost; even as o'er-careful house- 
wives, for safe keeping, hide something delectable 
or necessary, belonging to the male side of the 
house — hide it so successfully that it is not forth- 
coming in the hour of necessity. * * * 

The last red eye has winked itself into oblivion 
now and, Schopenhauer closed but still on my 
lap, I still sit and muse above the once ardent 
ashes. Musing thus, listening to the wind moan- 
ing about the house gables, is it not the forecast 
of old age, when the tension shall relax and the 
vision dim, while slowly the cold of stagnant blood 
creeps upward until the vital parts are reached 
and all is over? The air of the room chills, and 
my heart stirs with a vague loneliness, as of the 
forsaken. But such gray fancies, true mates of 
the ashes, are not my normal way of meditation, 
and finally I spring up as the clock below stairs 
strikes twelve with musical iteration. I build me 
in a trice another fire and marking what a goodly 
bed the former blaze has left for its successor, 
I say in dumb argument with my critical ego: 
"This has been no annihilation; here is substitu- 



INDOORS AND OUT 173 

tion, not destruction ; nothing is lost in this trans- 
lation of the wood; the phenomenal aspect of the 
process is a mere eye-cheat and, dealt with by 
either reason or faith, there is no cause for me- 
grims or mooning." And, comforted at heart, I 
brood on until the first faint twitter of birds her- 
alds the coming of the hopeful dawn that shall 
bring a new day of work and growth and worship. 

II 

When the Sap Runs Up in the Trees 

It seems somewhiles, at the turn of the year, as 
if the time of buds and birds would never come. 
New England is famous for this hesitant mood, 
this chariness in surrendering her wintry fortress 
to the winsome season for which man waits and 
yearns. 

Late in March I stand and look across the fields 
that lie as barren and bleak as ever they did in 
mid December. The left-over leaves of yesteryear 
hang in straggling bunches and splashes on beech 
boughs and elms, ghostly pale ; you would say they 
never could be shaken off by the wind, or pushed 
aside when the vital sprouts of the new year 
prick their way into sight. It is a time for faith, 
hope, and charity. The air is raw and harsh; 
the clouds lower gloomily, and as like as not a 
nor'easter settles down for several days on end, 
the fittest thing possible in this monochrome of 



174 FORCES IN FICTION 

cold grays and unlustrous browns. After the 
storm, I stroll along the river bank; the face of 
nature still betokens a sombre mood, and the fields 
are as before, dreary-colored, the trees gaunt skel- 
etons creaking like gallows that dangle corpses 
in their air graves on high. But of a sudden, 
my eye catches the hue of the alders that grow be- 
side the stream, and my heart gives a great thump 
of joy; for lo! the branches are a flare of dull, 
strange, dusky yellow, a note of spring, so in- 
definite, so out of sympathy with the landscape 
round about, as to make almost an impression of 
the uncanny, the supernatural. And, next day, 
walking down the stately avenue, I am aware 
that the arching boughs of the soft maples have 
thrown a branched redness on the air, signet of the 
sprouting tide, and so welcome with their mass 
of rich bold color that one is tempted to idleness 
beneath their pleached pleasance. And these 
signs, mark you, are before the general carnival 
of sounds and sights, when every fool knows it is 
spring, and a song on the lips is the meet way of 
praise. As yet, bleakness, gray tints, and inhos- 
pitable suns. 

But a week later comes a change ; a really bland 
day, mild and soft with south winds, and filtered 
through and thorough-through with sunshine, — 
a miracle to answer the doubt and fear bred of 
Nature's sphinx-like manner of silence as to her 
intentions. It is too good to be verity, and I 
pinch myself to make sure I am all awake. The- 



INDOORS AND OUT 175 

oretically, I knew spring would arrive, and that 
once come she would be companioned by beauty. 
But oh, treacherous memory, knowing is one 
thing, and feeling a magical other! I had for- 
gotten how sweet was the smell of the succulent 
new grass, how silver-blithe the robin at my 
morning window, how ineffably tender the green 
of the leafing trees. The shades, transitions, 
chromatic nuances of this spring foliage; who 
has ever expressed their charm and loveliness? 
They are as ethereal as colors seen in dreams, yet 
as fresh and splendidly vivid as the first flower 
of Eden's garden. Gaze at the willow, for ex- 
ample, until that delicate ravishment of budding 
life is part of you, and then let your vision feed 
on the dark emerald of the lawn uplit by yellow 
splashes of sun; what a contrast, what exhaust- 
less pleasure of shifting tints and tones, and all 
within the gamut of a single color, nature's sum- 
mer favorite ! And peach and cherry trees, too, 
are aburst with blossoms, pink, perfect, scattering 
odors as a wind-puff scatters leaves; the apple 
boughs will follow soon and add their virginal 
whiteness to the orchard symphony. Then how 
the birds respond to the lure of the sun ! It will 
be high tide with them before one is awake, for 
even to-day, listening, you shall hear bobolinks, 
grosbeaks, and orioles, in full chorus. A robin, fat 
and familiar in his gayety of livery, alights on 
the ground only a few feet off, and with head 
a-cock lets one admire his splendor of waistcoat 



176 FORGES IN FICTION 

and the smug proportions of one who is the pride 
of his family. And in early evening, the thrush- 
note floats down from among the tree-tops like a 
voice from the other side of the year. The first 
twilights out-of-doors, how good they are, what 
mystic hours of revery and sweet illusion ! Once 
again the frogs are at it in the pond, and the vast, 
vocal night takes their croaking and blends it in 
with the other nocturnal noises, by some wonder- 
work making a many-voiced music. 

When the moon rolls up from the nether east 
to make fairyland of the wood, and shows us our 
dear ones sitting by our side draped in soft cling- 
ing white stuffs and with uncovered hair, upon 
which the dews fall harmless, and from which 
exhale the rich scents of some exotic of the south, 
how sense-enthralling yet spiritual is the hour! 
Hark, that you may pick out, in the orchestra of 
night, the pellucid obligato of the little stream 
yonder in the bottom glade. For now are the 
waters loosened, every brook overflows, and from 
sources innumerable, swollen by snows wherever 
pines make shade, and hoar and cavernous rocks 
elude the sun's touch, the rivulets turn torrents, 
and what was yesterday a barren place to-day 
promises fair pasturage for flocks and herds. That 
sweet-sounding phrase, "the sound of many 
waters," came to the singer on some such time 
and tide as this, when spring wrought marvels 
with the land, and Mature donned her festal robes 
after the sack-cloth and ashes of hibernation. If 



INDOORS AND OUT 177 

one be a veritable worshipper of Pan, may not 
the murmur of the sap running Tip in the trees be 
heard distinctlier the more of love is in the soul ? 
A gentle, mellow sound it is, an overtone of joy 
to the graver doings of earth and sky. Some day 
now I shall uncover deep in the boscage the shy 
pink blooms and the spicy fragrance of the arbu- 
tus, firstling of April flowers. Ah, Spring, of a 
truth, thou art the Age of Gold come again; 
eternal youth is in thy buoyant paths, and mortal 
man must be enamoured of thee until the end of 
ends. 



MAR 13 



MAR 13 1902 



MAR. 13 1902 



MAR. 21 ]902 



I 



